Hideo Kojima’s studio says it will consider ‘legal action’ after fake assassin posts circulate

Hideo Kojima’s recreation studio has issued a reaction immediately after phony posts circulated across social media and information shops that misidentified Kojima as the assassin of previous Japanese Primary Minister Shinzo Abe. In a tweet, Kojima Productions says it “strongly condemns the spread of fake information and rumors that convey false information” and “will contemplate taking lawful motion in some scenarios.”

On Friday, a male shot and killed Abe for the duration of his speech at a political campaign rally. Police captured the shooter at the scene who was later on recognized as 41-calendar year-outdated Tetsuya Yamagami.

Shortly immediately after the incident, an world wide web troll on 4chan posted a racist image that backlinks Kojima’s facial area with that of the shooter (via PCGamer). Yet another user replied to the put up with three further pics of Kojima that exhibit the Steel Equipment and Death Stranding designer in a Soviet cap, as effectively as posing with photographs of Argentine groundbreaking Che Guevara.

French comic Georges Jordito later on reshared these pictures on Twitter as element of a now-deleted “satirical” put up that reported the perpetrator was Japanese soccer star Keisuke Honda. Nonetheless, Damien Rieu, a significantly-right French politician related with the country’s nationalist movement, took it severely and tweeted out photos of Kojima with textual content translated to: “The considerably-remaining kills.” As pointed out by Vice, the photographs were then picked up by Greek and Iranian news shops that mistakenly made use of the shots in their protection of the assassination.

Rieu has because deleted his tweet and issued an apology to Kojima, noting “I naively took a joke for information.” The Greek outlet, which provided an graphic of Kojima in a broadcast, took its segment off of YouTube, when the Iranian newspaper has also corrected the impression it utilised in its report.