Last week, a false rumor telling that you will need to pay to tweet on Twitter from July 1 was widely circulated in Japanese twittersphere.
Many of those tweets pointed a single source, Uncyclopedia Japan’s news, titled with “Twitter Japanese version will be switched to a paid service from July”, which explained the background why Twitter decided this move, 1. Eastern Japan Great Disaster increased Japanese Twitter usage about doubled, and the traffic is making Twitter unstable, and 2. US Twitter gets anxious that many popular Japanese celebrities tend to be deceived and spread false rumors after the earthquake and people started calling Twitter as “Idiot Detector”(which is really seen on 2-channel and other places). The article came with plausible monthly fee table with how your number of followings/followers and tweets leads your amount of payment. With the highest plan with $15,000/month, you can tweet as much as you want.
Of course, there are some users who know what Uncyclopedia is, however, as the news itself said, storm of retweets washed away their tweets. “Twitter Yuuryouka(Twitter Charges)” was on Japanese trending topic. There are many tweets who bought the story recorded [J] on tweets curation service Togetter.
Twitter’s Japanese assistant account @twj had to tell “There is no such a plan to charge on tweets.” [J]
Then, many of the deceived people got mad and tweeted [J] that the false news originated from “malicious false rumor website”(Akushitsu na dema site). Some claimed that Twitter or government or someone should close those lying websites…
Following this, Uncyclopedia Japan created a new entry “malicious false rumor website” [J], Uncyclomedia foundation honorably accepted this new title.
