You don’t have to feel hatred to spit it out. ” A Chinese garment factory is plagued by insect pests!”Chinese bed bugs are invading Japan!” 30% of sex offenders in Japan are South Koreans!” A transgender man brutally rapes an 11-year-old girl!”
What, if not hatred, is the indispensable quality? Trading instinct. According to Shukan Gendai (November 11-18), fake news is big business: “more lucrative than genuine news. “A declared supplier of this waste claims to have a source of income of one million yen per month.
It is a 27-year-old man, discreet and soft-spoken, who receives the journalist from Gendai in his office-residence with the air of a guy who has nothing to hide. The journalist first heard about him through a mutual acquaintance and left him. a message: “Can we talk?” Absolutely. “
Following orders toward the seventh floor of a 10-story building in central Tokyo, he found himself in an undeniable room, 15 carpets wide, surely bare for a small desk, a desktop computer, a folding bed, and on the windowsill. , some problems from the manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. “M. T,” as Gendai calls him, is nicely dressed in a gray cardigan and pants. “Sorry, there are no chairs. Minimalist.
“I have no political convictions of any kind or prejudices,” says T. So why does a highly political and harmful website work?To his credit, he is frank: “Far-right sites make money. “
Fake news and hate speech are commodities like any other, whose price is proportional to the demand they satisfy. “I produce the demagogic material that the far right loves,” he says: an average of 4 articles a day, 30 a month, or so, and I paint 4 days a week. The writing is crude, the content slanderous, the evidence scant or nonexistent. The most productive thing we can say about it is that it doesn’t pretend to be bigger than it is. “”On right-wing sites,” T explains, “there doesn’t need to be any link between the name and the content. The name is the most important thing. This is what fuels the hatred of the right. The number of audiences in a pile of thousands suggests that he knows what he’s doing. These numbers appeal to advertisers. T’s inflated source of income is his reward, and if he has doubts about what he’s doing, his first idea dispels them.
You might think that legal barriers would come into effect at some point, however, Japan’s 2016 hate speech law prohibits little and doesn’t penalize anything; or that search engine blacklists would block access, and this is the case to some extent, but probably easy to circumvent; or at least those who promote them would be reluctant to associate their products with the most vulgar hate speech, but that doesn’t necessarily happen either: “Health food corporations promote them on questionable adult sites without damaging their logo image,” Gendai says. Journalist Hiroshi Mikami.
They give us a little overview. I finished school and was assigned a job at a TV station. “They worked young workers like slaves,” he says. Four years have left him on the edge. One night, he and a frifinish went out for a drink and the frifinish talked about his father, who had recently become a “netto-uyo” and a regular character on far-right websites. Its rise is partly explained by the Covid-19 crisis. The September 19 crisis, a popular expression, especially among older people, of worries and frustrations akin to plague, quarantine, and perhaps other things – aging, the bleak state of the world in general. There is no end to things that arouse worry and frustration. , or to evils for which the only (at best productive palliative) is scapegoats, the more the better, whose fault it is, or we can say, if things are in such a mess.
T’s friend worried. T, however, saw a soft pop in his brain: an idea. He went home, browsed some netto-uyo sites, and thought, “I can do better. “And he did.
This is one of them