By KENRO KURODA/ Staff Writer
August 6, 2024 at 17:26 JST
A disaster-stricken area in Suzu, Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Noto Peninsula at 9:06 a.m. on Jan. 2, 2024 (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Approximately 10 percent of online postings asking for assistance in a recent natural disaster have been determined to be false, according to a government research institute.
The reason for those fake postings on X, formerly Twitter, is believed to be the popularity of social media, where posts attracting clicks will earn advertising revenue.
The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), operated by the internal affairs ministry, collected 10 percent of postings written in Japanese and posted on X within 24 hours after the Noto Peninsula earthquake on Jan. 1.
Of these, it studied about 17,000 postings related to disaster information in Ishikawa Prefecture by using artificial intelligence.
Among the 17,000 postings, 1,091 were requests for emergency rescue.
The research institute examined the included written addresses to determine if they actually exist and referred to the news reports to confirm if the situations claimed were legitimate.
As a result, it believes 104 postings were false.
NICT said that there were postings that included nonexistent addresses and ones made by foreign accounts.
There were also cases in which several different accounts calling for emergency rescue used an identical sentence.
Some social media sites have a system where individuals earn more advertising revenue as the number of views increases.
The system is called the "attention economy" and is believed to be a factor for the increasing fake postings.
Those false postings calling for rescue on social media in the Noto earthquake on Jan. 1 have become a social problem.
A man who lived in Saitama Prefecture was arrested in July by Ishikawa prefectural police on suspicion of engaging in fraudulent obstruction of business by impersonating a disaster victim.
The man is accused of posting false requests for rescue, which hampered police search-and-rescue operations in the aftermath of the quake.
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