Approximately two in three people object to targeted advertisements on the internet, according to a recent nationwide survey on the media published Thursday by The Yomiuri Shimbun   The findings come from a Yomiuri Shimbun survey conducted from Aug. 17 to Sept. 22 canvassing 3,000 people across the country. Of them, 2,140, or 71%, responded.   Targeted advertising involves showing….Read more

Unreliable information and malicious false rumors have been spreading in society. This is especially intolerable when it comes to the novel coronavirus. We wish to bring to mind again the role media organizations should play in verifying facts and conveying them correctly.   Newspaper Week will start on Oct. 15. Regarding the coronavirus, suspicious information was observed mainly on the….Read more

According to the Jiji Press public opinion poll on newspapers, 59.5% of pollees said they “subscribe” to a newspaper, down by 3.0 percentage points from the 62.5% found in the previous poll conducted in September 2020. [Jiji Press has conducted this poll on newspapers every year since 2008.] In 2008, 86.2% reported that they subscribe to a newspaper, and the….Read more

BY TOMOHIRO OSAKI, STAFF WRITER When Kei Komuro, the boyfriend of Princess Mako, was accosted by a Japanese TV crew on the streets of New York last week, a resulting headline made a show of the fact that he was sporting a ponytail.   “Kei Komuro spotted in New York, his long hair tied back,” a Fuji News Network (FNN)….Read more

Social networking sites (SNSs) have become a major battleground for drumming up support in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential election campaign amid the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the benchmarks used to gauge the popularity of candidates is the number of people who stop to listen to speeches on the street. But LDP leadership contenders have had few opportunities to….Read more

Cyberbullies may soon face stricter penalties under proposed changes to Japan’s criminal code that aim to crack down on online attacks.   The Justice Ministry plans to submit revisions to the Penal Code in mid-September for review by the Legislative Council, an advisory panel to the justice minister.   The Penal Code applies the term “insult” to a wide range….Read more

Hiroshima University Graduate School associate professor Ito Ryuta, who specializes in international politics, posted a discriminatory remark on his Twitter account, saying, “We don’t need to seriously deal with Chinese people, who are morally inferior,” it was learned on Aug. 10. A student group working against discrimination has launched a campaign for collecting signatures to call on the multiple universities….Read more