More than 25.5 per cent of survey respondents said they were exposed to fake news online after recent disasters
More than a quarter of Japanese citizens were exposed to rumours or falsehoods on social media following natural disasters, according to a new survey, with some admitting they inadvertently hampered emergency responses by sharing the misinformation.
The study was conducted by the Japanese Red Cross Society in the run-up to Disaster Prevention Day on Monday. The annual event commemorates the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, a magnitude-8 tremor that struck some 60km southwest of Tokyo and caused widespread devastation across the region. As many as 140,000 people died in the disaster.
The Red Cross survey indicated that 25.5 per cent of the 1,200 people quizzed across Japan had received deliberately false information through their social media feeds in the aftermath of previous disasters. Of that total, more than 45 per cent said they sought to verify the information through other sources, while 7.5 per cent said they flagged the report as inaccurate.
Nearly 5 per cent, however, said they acted on reports that they later realised were false and more than 8 per cent said they shared the erroneous information with other people.
