Misleading: 21,000 Registered Voters in Pennsylvania Were Dead
While national media reported Biden’s victory on November 7, President Trump refused to concede Biden’s victory, claiming the election was rigged. …Read More
Category: Fact-checking
False: NY Times reports 90% of PCR-positive cases are misdiagnosed
Increasingly accounts have been circulating that the New York Times is reporting that 90% of the positive PCR tests had been misdiagnosed. These accounts were translated into Japanese from an American blog site …Read More
Cross-border misinformation: Vladimir Putin’s daughter dies after receiving Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine
A twitter post by a cartoonist Kobun Son claiming “President Putin’s daughter has died after being injected with the first ever vaccine for COVID-19 developed in Russia” garners 4100 retweets after being posted online on August 17th. …Read More
Cross-border misinformation: Taiwanese military fires anti-aircraft missiles at Chinese fighter jets
A YouTube video titled in Japanese “Taiwanese military fires anti-aircraft missiles at Chinese fighter jets that violated Taiwanese airspace! They’ve successfully turned the Chinese fighter jets away!” exceeded 610,000 views as of the time of the writing this article after being posted online on August 18th. …Read More
Unsubstantiated information: COVID-19 patients in Fukuoka and Gunma commit suicide after suffering abuse
Several posts have been surfacing claiming that a few COVID-19 patients and their families in Fukuoka and Gunma had been driven to suicide or out of their jobs after suffering abuse. …Read More
Unsubstantiated information: Tokyo’s Yamanote railway line stopped displaying Chinese and Korean signage
A photo of a display monitor on Japan Railways’ Yamanote line with the caption “[GOOD NEWS] The Yamanote Line no longer displays the names of stations in Chinese and Korean” was posted on twitter and garnered 4,600 retweets. …Read More
Unfounded: The man who won the Nobel Prize for developing the PCR methods says, ‘It’s not fit to identify viruses’
“The Nobel Prize winner who developed the PCR method says that it is not fit to identify the virus,” Kunihiko Takeda, a Designated Professor at Chubu University, said on July 24 on the widely watched internet TV “Toranomon News”. …Read More
Unsubstantiated information：The main chemical blamed in the blast that rocked the Lebanese capital had been imported from South Korea
An article with the headline “The chemical ingredients behind the Lebanon blast – ammonium nitrate – had been imported from South Korea in 2015” was posted on August 8th in a news aggregator website Share News Japan and shared widely on Twitter, with over 3400 retweets. …Read More
Unsubstantiated information: German high schools get free tests for the novel coronavirus twice a week
A tweet claiming “German high schools are offering free saliva tests for the novel coronavirus twice a week,” posted on August 6th was retweeted over 2,900 times. …Read More
Cross-border misinformation: Mystery Seeds Shipped from China are Giant Hogweed
From June to July, there have been a number of cases overseas and in Japan where seeds of unknown plants were delivered in unidentified packages purportedly from various addresses in China. …Read More