Serious circumstances of Yuzuru Hanyu’s ‘fake accounts’ Experts point out ‘evil of Elon Mask’ |

What is the serious reality of the fake account problem? About half a year has passed since Yuzuru Hanyu (28), who won two consecutive Olympic gold medals in men’s figure skating, turned professional. While attracting many fans with the same presence as before, fake accounts disguised as official have appeared on Twitter and become a big problem. Therefore, this paper took a direct look at Kensaku Fukui, an attorney familiar with copyright law and entertainment media law. Problems were clarified from an expert’s point of view.

Hanyu opened his own official Twitter account at 1:11 am on September 30, 2011, and actively disseminates information about the ice show. She has over 170,000 followers as of January 30th.

However, now it is becoming a problem that fake accounts are flooding in to try to piggyback on its popularity. Although it is currently frozen, there was a situation where a fake account was given a blue certification mark of “Twitter Blue”.

Lawyer Fukui pointed out that this situation is one of the turmoil since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. “Conventional certification marks were intended to ensure credibility, and were supposed to be created as a countermeasure against impersonation of celebrities, but now everyone can receive the same mark if they pay. That’s fine, but I don’t understand the sense of giving everyone the same mark as before,” he complained.

On top of that, he questioned the situation where anyone could easily get a mark that was a symbol of their identity as long as they paid. “It’s strange that there aren’t more incidents like this one,” he said worriedly. If you find a fake account, the best thing to do is to report it to Twitter, either yourself or someone who notices it. However, there is no guarantee that a freeze request will be acted upon immediately. Rather, he warned of the current situation, saying, “We changed the service to one that is prone to fraud, and reduced the number of personnel who should be able to deal with such fraud.”

Creating a fake account can also be a violation of the law. “Isn’t this going to interfere with Hanyu’s business or constitute unfair competition? The name ‘Yuzuru Hanyu’ is also the name of a professional skater’s business, so if that name is used for illegal purposes without permission, unfair competition will be established. I will,” he pointed out. Business obstruction can be punished with imprisonment with work for up to three years or a fine of up to 500,000 yen, while unfair competition can be punished with imprisonment with work for up to five years or a fine of up to 5 million yen.

Although it is the fate of a star, it is still a nuisance. It seems that it is necessary to ask the person who receives the service to behave moderately.