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

Hideo Kojima’s video game studio has issued a response right after pretend posts circulated throughout social media and news outlets that misidentified Kojima as the assassin of previous Japanese Key Minister Shinzo Abe. In a tweet, Kojima Productions suggests it “strongly condemns the unfold of bogus news and rumors that convey phony information” and “will consider using 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 afterwards discovered as 41-year-previous Tetsuya Yamagami.

Soon after the incident, an web troll on 4chan posted a racist graphic that back links Kojima’s deal with with that of the shooter (by way of PCGamer). An additional user replied to the put up with a few further photos of Kojima that clearly show the Metallic Equipment and Loss of life Stranding designer in a Soviet cap, as properly as posing with visuals of Argentine groundbreaking Che Guevara.

French comedian Georges Jordito later reshared these pictures on Twitter as section of a now-deleted “satirical” post that reported the culprit was Japanese soccer star Keisuke Honda. Having said that, Damien Rieu, a significantly-correct French politician related with the country’s nationalist movement, took it severely and tweeted out photographs of Kojima with text translated to: “The significantly-left kills.” As pointed out by Vice, the illustrations or photos were being then picked up by Greek and Iranian information outlets that mistakenly made use of the pictures in their coverage of the assassination.

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