I kind of assume this happens with every major event, am I wrong?
The interrubes are full of racist stuff. As others have pointed out, it's only at the conclusion of major sporting events media people will go looking to find it and aggregate it.
That **** happens every time USA plays Japan in anything.
I don't know if I'd call it dishonest, but there's something a bit... something about these sorts of stories. As people note, I can search twitter and likely come up with 20 really terrible statues on anything. There's a ****load of people using twitter. While it's sad that some of them are giant *******s, 20 tweets aren't really indicative of anything beyond that. So easy to write stuff like this and just abandon any sense of perspective.