About 80% of Japanese are Unknowingly Deceived by Internet’s Fake News

The Bucha massacre was committed by the Ukrainians.

If you get the vaccine, you will die within five years.

These were the news spread on the Internet last year. Of course, they are not true. They are the so-called fake news.

When most people see this kind of information, they think, “I won’t be fooled. However, you must be on your guard. With the spread of smartphones and social networking services, fake news is flooding the world, and its contents are becoming more and more sophisticated.

It is said that the term fake news became widely recognized around 2016. During the U.S. presidential election between Donald Trump (76) and Hillary Clinton (75) that year, fake information was spread approximately 38 million times by both camps. Since then, the number has continued to increase.

says Shinichi Yamaguchi, associate professor at the Center for Global Communications, International University of Japan. He is a leading researcher who was quick to sound the alarm about the problem of fake news and continues to analyze it.

Who is creating fake news, which has become a social problem in the age of social networking, and for what purpose? And who is spreading it? Based on Yamaguchi’s latest research, we will explore the reality of this phenomenon.

Surprising Identity of the Producer

The first thing that concerns us is the identity of those who are spreading fake news. A report published in 2021 by CCDH, a U.S. non-profit organization, caused quite a stir.

The study found that of the more than 800,000 fake news stories posted on social networking sites about the coronavirus vaccine between February 1 and March 16, ’21, 65% were created and spread from just 12 accounts. These were wealthy individuals who deal in nutritional supplements, businessmen who sell anti-vaccine health books and DVDs, and doctors. They were an organization of more than 200 people who made a profit of 4 billion yen through sales of goods and services.

A large amount of money was also spent behind the scenes during the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

One famous example is the spread of false information that the Pope endorses Trump. At first glance, one might think it was politically motivated, but it was not. It was created for the purpose of generating a large amount of advertising revenue if it became viral. Some of them were created by Macedonian students, and some of them even exceeded their parents’ lifetime income.

The more fake news spreads, the more huge profits can be made. That is why so many people are deceived by the clever ones that are created one after another.