False claims about the earthquake that killed 38 people in Japan have spread on social media, from denials that the tremor occurred at all to fabricated images of the wreckage.
The magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit the southern island of Kyushu in Kumamoto prefecture on 28 July, collapsing a part of a shopping centre in Kashima when thousands of people were inside and prompting the evacuation of nearly 300,000 residents. The prefectural government said on Monday that 38 had died and more than 120 injured.
The main strand of falsehood holds that the earthquake, like many before it, was man-made.
Posts in Japanese referring to an artificial earthquake numbered in the hundreds in the days before the Kyushu tremor struck, according to an analysis by the American monitoring firm Meltwater. They jumped to about 10,000 on the day itself and 38,000 the day after.
Such posts are still appearing daily in the tens of thousands, though many are refuting the claim rather than making it.
One account with a record of spreading false claims about earthquakes wrote in a post viewed about three million times that the reading showed an explosion rather than a tremor.
Claims of manufactured earthquakes have been so widespread that the Seismological Society of Japan, the main body of earthquake scientists in the country, has added a section to its website to address the idea, describing it as unrealistic.
Setting off an explosion at the depth of a real earthquake would mean drilling a shaft 10km...
False claims about the earthquake that killed 38 people in Japan have spread on social media, from denials that the tremor occurred at all to fabricated images of the wreckage. The magnitude-6.8 e...