Investigative and fact-checking journalism
On July 26, a Japanese tweet sharing a video posted by a user from outside of Japan claimed that the video was “Apple’s AR glasses concept”. This tweet went viral with 39,000 retweets in Japanese. …Read More
On July 20, a Japanese blog titled “President of Ghana reveals Rockefeller Foundation’s planning document” went viral with up to 1,700 retweets on Twitter. …Read More
A photo of a deer covered in tumors with a caption claiming it had eaten plants and trees sprayed with Monsanto’s Roundup was posted in Japanese on July 19th and immediately went viral on Twitter. …Read More
A twitter post purportedly showing that the WHO said that coronavirus patients require neither quarantine nor social distancing because “It cannot even transmit from one patient to another” was posted on July 4, and went viral, being retweeted over 2,800 times. …Read More
News that the Japanese government will dip into its supplementary budget to launch a “Go To Travel Campaign” in the hope of attracting tourists back to the depressed tourism sector has spread overseas and construed to mean “half of the travel expenses of foreign nationals will be subsidized by the government”. …Read More
Minister of Finance Taro Aso told parliament on June 4 that Japan has fewer COVID-19 deaths than other countries because Japanese people have higher moral standards and had obeyed the government’s more lenient requests for self-restraint despite there being no penalties. …Read More
A twitter post of a screenshot of a NHK’s news video story with the captions reading that the Supreme Court judged for the first time that “foreigners are not considered ‘citizens’ protected by the Public Assistance Act” has gone viral in Japan. …Read More
A twitter post purportedly showing how CNN in the U.S. had doctored a photo of a man who fired a gun (into Black Lives Matter protests) to make it look as if he were white has gone viral in the United States. …Read More
Kunihiko Takeda, a professor at Chubu University, said on YouTube: “PCR test is pointless as a test to detect Covid-19 as the PCR test detects not only the ‘Wuhan cold’ and also the ‘common cold’. Both tests will come out positive”. …Read More
According to Chinese mini-blog Weibo, which quoted a report by Japanese broadcaster TV Asahi around the end of April, 120 people were infected in two days in a large-scale hospital-associated infection (HAI) outbreak in Osaka due to a nurse who tested positive for covid-19 and who was forced to continue to work at her hospital. …Read More