Investigative and fact-checking journalism
“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
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
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
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
A posting on Chinese social media network Weibo first seen on July 22 claimed “(At the Tokyo Metropolitan government) there are only two fax machines made available to process data, and each machine can only process data of up to 150 people a day. …Read More
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