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Cross-border misinformation: Vladimir Putin’s daughter dies after receiving Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine

Posted on2020年9月4日AuthorRei Ofuna

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

Posted on2020年9月4日AuthorRei Ofuna

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

Posted on2020年9月4日2020年9月4日AuthorRei Ofuna

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

Posted on2020年8月27日2020年8月28日AuthorRei Ofuna

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’

Posted on2020年8月21日AuthorYoichiro Tateiwa

“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

Posted on2020年8月21日AuthorRei Ofuna

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

Posted on2020年8月21日AuthorRei Ofuna

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

Posted on2020年8月19日2020年8月28日AuthorRei Ofuna

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

False: Tokyo infection figures can’t exceed 300 people per day due to the use of fax machines

Posted on2020年8月15日AuthorYa Jung Chih

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

Cross-border misinformation: Video explaining how Apple’s AR glasses work

Posted on2020年8月10日2020年8月10日AuthorRei Ofuna

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