Imagine waking up one day to discover that you are being denounced as a criminal over an incident that you actually had nothing to do with.
This happened to a woman who runs her own company in Tokyo -- she became the target of a false rumor on the internet last summer and was suddenly inundated with defamatory messages from countless people online.
"It felt good to slam someone on the internet," one such person said in an interview with The Yomiuri Shimbun, indicating how easily people can rush to attack others online.
At about 6 a.m. on Aug. 17 last year the woman's smartphone started vibrating constantly by her bedside. Thinking they were messages from her company, the woman got up but left the phone unchecked for a while.
She later saw a message sent from a friend via social media, saying, "Something awful has been happening to you."
When the woman checked her accounts on social media and aggregator websites, she found that her photograph, real name and the telephone number of her company had been posted and there was a huge number of defamatory posts about her.
On the previous day of Aug. 16, Fumio Miyazaki had been put on a wanted list on suspicion of inflicting bodily injury by punching a car driver after forcing him to pull over on the Joban Expressway in Ibaraki Prefecture. Miyazaki, 44, is currently being tried.
Miyazaki's girlfriend, 51, was also in his car at the time and has been given a summary order on a charge of helping Miyazaki to avoid capture.
The incident was captured by the driving recorder of the assaulted driver's car and later carried in news media. Numerous messages searching for the male and the female suspects were posted on the internet.
The source of the slanderous rumor remains unknown, but the female business owner was suddenly and wrongly named as the woman who had been in Miyazaki's car.
This soon led to a deluge of defamatory messages from anonymous individuals, saying things like "Is this the person who was riding in the car driven by the man who tailgated that vehicle?" and "You are equally culpable, together with Miyazaki. You should expect to be punished socially."
The business owner wrote on Facebook at about 8 a.m. Aug 17 that "these are not the true facts." However, the slanderous online comments grew in intensity, reaching over 1,000 in all. People wrote such comments as "Surrender to the police immediately!"
On that same day, she received 280 harassing phone calls.
The following day, the woman consulted with her lawyer and posted on her company's homepage that she would consider taking legal action. After the male and the female suspects were arrested later that day, numerous apologies were offered to the woman and her lawyer.
The woman has identified the authors of more than 50 of the vicious messages posted against her, and intends to seek legal redress.
Already in October last year, she brought a suit against a 58-year-old former municipal assembly member from Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, seeking damages of 1.1 million yen. A ruling is to be handed down on Aug. 17 at the Tokyo District Court. According to the woman's petition, the former municipal assembly member posted a photograph of her face on his Facebook page and wrote a message saying, "The woman who was aboard that man's car has reportedly been found."
The woman said: "How can they believe unclear information and defame other people? I want to spread awareness that just retweeting such information without thinking about the consequences could constitute a crime."
-- 'It felt good'
"It felt good to slam someone on the internet. Even if it turned out to be a false rumor, I didn't take it seriously, since I figured it would be OK if I deleted it later," a jobless man in his 20s said remorsefully. He believed the online rumors about the woman being a criminal and posted messages defaming her.
The man posted her real name on Twitter and wrote such messages as "Go to a jail cell, please." His number of views, which usually totaled about 100 in three days, rose sharply to 500 to 600 in a matter of hours. After the information online was later shown to be false, the man apologized by email to the woman's lawyer, saying, "I'm very sorry that I made such offensive and provocative remarks to her."
The man said he has been mentally unstable since his elementary school days, and does not go out except when his physical condition is stable. He has never held a job and with a daily allowance of just 1,000 yen from his parents, he spends most of his time on his smartphone or using a computer at home.
Asked why he believed the false rumors and posted defamatory messages, the man said with his head bowed: "I can't let out my frustrations in the real world. I think that's why people try to shake off their unhappiness by banding together to attack someone like that."
Shinichiro Okamoto, a professor at Aichi Gakuin University and a scholar of social psychology, said: "The original commenter who posts a false rumor tends not to realize their mistake because of their moral feeling that 'I want to let our society know who the criminal is.' People who post things after the first person assume that the information must be true because there are lots of similar messages, so they easily follow suit."
Okamoto added, "People should pause before posting messages and be aware that if the information is wrong, they could be hurting that person and may even be held responsible."
Photo caption:
Above: A defamatory message posted on the woman's social media account (image is partly modified)
Below: This woman was inundated with defamatory messages as a result of a false rumor spread on the internet.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
