Hideo Kojima's Studio Is Considering Legal Action After Rumors Linking Him To Shinzo Abe Murder

Hideo Kojima's Kojima Productions have mentioned that they're "considering legal action" after their founder and namesake has been wrongly implicated in the tragic murder of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

(Photo : CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images)
Japanese video game designer, writer, director and producer Hideo Kojima speaks on stage to present his new video game "Death Stranding" during the Tokyo Game Show in Makuhari, Chiba Prefecture on September 12, 2019

Numerous fake news posts sprouted on social media saying that the game industry legend was allegedly Abe's killer. In response, Kojima Productions has mentioned that they strongly condemn the spread of fake news and rumors, which followed the posting of an allegedly racist image on the troll-heavy site 4chan, reports The Verge.

The 4chan post showed an image of Abe's killer, now identified as 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, with a superimposed picture of Hideo Kojima alleging that it was him. Another user then posted a few images of Kojima wearing a Soviet cap and posing with a portrait well-known revolutionary Che Guevarra, with all posts technically classified as jokes.

Eventually, a few others on the internet would share and reshare the images until it was picked up by French far-right politician Damien Rieu. Rieu took the clearly false images as fact, tweeting images of Kojima with a text that says "the far-left kills" in French. Here is Rieu's now-deleted tweet:

It just all snowballed from there as a few Iranian and Greek news outlets then took Rieu's false information and basically reported them as fact, using the images the French politician tweeted in their coverage of the Shinzo Abe assassination (via VICE). A Greek outlet has removed its broadcast from its YouTube channel, while the Iranian paper has corrected the image they used.

Rieu then issued an apology to Kojima and Metal Gear fans, saying he "naively" took fake information as real without ever verifying it:

It is not known whether Kojima Productions or Hideo Kojima himself will file a lawsuit against Rieu and others who reported the fake news, but only time will tell at this point.

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More Problems In The Shinzo Abe-Hideo Kojima Hoax

Going into a bit more detail regarding this case, one would see that there's far more problematic information at play here.

Damien Rieu, the French politician that took the hoax as fact, is a very controversial person to say the least. According to PCGamer, he was the co-founder of the movement called Generation Identitaire - a group widely known in France for being an Islamophobic and white nationalist organization. When he saw the satirical tweet by the comedian Georges Jordito, he took the images as fact and "proof" that "the far left kills":

But it was Jordito's tweet that makes one think what in the world entered Rieu's mind to make him believe it. The post made even more outlandish claims aside from linking Kojima to Abe's assassination. For one, it also jokingly said Kojima was a famous J-League football player, and was a "legend" at AC Milan.

Considering how the Metal Gear creator is hardly a non-famous individual (plus, there's freaking Google to verify reports, for pete's sake), Rieu's tweet made even more nonsensical when it had absolutely no basis to begin with.

Don't believe everything you see on the internet, folks.

Related Article: Apparently, Fans Are Petitioning That Hideo Kojima's Xbox Game Be Canceled

This article is posted on GameNGuide

Written by RJ Pierce