Earlier today, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shockingly assassinated. The internet then did its usual business of ramping up racist jokes from current events, which eventually led a news channel in Greece to misidentify famous game developer Hideo Kojima as the killer.
The “joke” was that Abe’s alleged killer looks like Kojima. It eventually made its way to Twitter, where far-right French politician Damien Rieu — perhaps not realizing it was a joke — retweeted images of Kojima, helping to spread more. Although Riou eventually deleted the tweets, it looks like the damage had already been done and could have misled at least one news channel in Greece that was covering the assassination.
During a story about the attack on Abe, the news channel showed images of Kojima and misidentified him as a murder suspect.
Hideo Kojima hasn’t responded to this yet. On ResetEra, where the topic of this situation originated, many call people who share this nonsense idiots and suggest that the media and media companies do not copy their stories from 4chan or jokey Twitter accounts.
