Friday 16 April 2021
12:00pm – 1:00pm

Fake News and Social Media: Perspectives from the UK and Japan

This event will start at 12pm BST (GMT+1)

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

Fully booked

The rise of “fake news” and other forms of misinformation are eroding trust in real news, generating concern in democratic systems worldwide. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020 found that fewer than four in ten people typically trust most news that they read, particularly on social media platforms. Fake news has also become an integral part of the political debate and political campaigning. The spread of inaccurate beliefs and misinformation have the potential to undermine democracies and create an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion.

In this webinar, chaired by James Harding, we discussed the current situation in the UK and Japan, the effects of social media on journalism, and the impact of the age of fake news on democracy.

A short summary of the event can be found via the link below, located on the Foundation’s Facebook page:

Event Summary

A video of the event can be watched below:

About the contributors

James Ball

James Ball is the global editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where he oversees the not-for-profit’s international reporting projects. He also works as a freelance writer and broadcaster, and is a weekly columnist for The New European. He was previously a special correspondent at BuzzFeed UK and special projects editor at The Guardian, where he played a key role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, as well as the offshore leaks, HSBC Files, Reading the Riots and Keep it in the Ground projects. James is the author of multiple books, including Post-Truth and Bluffocracy. His most recent book, The System: who owns the internet and how it owns us was published by Bloomsbury in August 2020.

Yoichiro Tateiwa

Yoichiro Tateiwa is a Japanese investigative journalist and the founder and executive editor of InFact, a non-profit online media organisation and leading news fact-checker in Japan. He previously worked for NHK (Japan’s public broadcaster), producing a range of investigative reporting programmes as well as taking a leading role in the Panama Papers. He is the Executive Director of the Japan Center for Money and Politics which he also co-founded. He was previously a visiting journalist at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University. He is the author of numerous books including What Is Fact Checking, which won the Book of the Year award from the Ozaki Yukio Foundation in 2019. He also regularly appears on national TV shows as a news commentator.

James Harding

James Harding (Chair) is the Co-founder and Editor of Tortoise Media, and prior to this was Director of News and Current Affairs at the BBC, the world’s largest news organisation. He was the Editor of The Times from 2007-2012, winning the Newspaper of the Year in two of the five years he edited the paper. He was previously The Times Business Editor, having joined from The Financial Times, where he worked as Washington Bureau Chief, Media Editor, and China correspondent, opening the paper’s bureau in Shanghai in 1996. He is the author of Alpha Dogs- How political spin became a global business and he presented On Background on the BBC World Service with Zanny Minton-Beddoes, editor of The Economist.