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The story
A survey reported by Forbes JAPAN named influencer social media as one of the “least trustworthy information sources,” while word-of-mouth from family and acquaintances, along with NHK’s TV broadcasts, ranked among the most trusted. When 5ch’s News Express+ board picked up the story, the thread filled with comments agreeing that “SNS is just sponsored posts chasing follower counts, so the ratio of junk to gems is sky-high,” alongside the surprising self-assessment that “honestly, 2ch/5ch is better off, since it’s harder to form echo chambers or astroturf here.” Opinions on NHK split between those who find it trustworthy and those who suspect political bias, and the discussion drifted from information sources in general to the broader question of public broadcasting’s standing.
The Two Least Trustworthy Information Sources: Why Influencer Social Media Flopped So Badly | Forbes JAPAN
2026.10.01 16:15
Forbes JAPAN Web-News | Forbes JAPAN Editorial Team
Source: forbesjapan.com / Original article here
What people said
Sure, there's a ton of lies here, but no echo chambers and it's harder to astroturf than on X or YouTube, so it's still better off…
Ever since posters became traceable,
all the industry pros and experts who used to spill insider info here vanished.
Now it's just old guys, shills, and 50-cent-army posters (slang for paid pro-China commenters).
Can't help it, everyone here's an amateur.
It's a mixed bag here too, but over there the junk-to-gem ratio feels overwhelmingly higher.
Anything goes as long as it racks up followers.
Compared to that, the 'ancient history' reply threads around here are downright cute (a joking nickname for old bumped threads, after the 8th-century Kojiki chronicle).
What's even left after that?
Just Darwin specials? (NHK's nature documentary series)
"Next up, a story from the streets: using Korean words is all the rage among young people these days."
↑ They'll casually slip stuff like this in without blinking lol
Just go defect to some anti-vax country already.
Obviously beauty gurus and affiliate-link spammers are a lost cause, but still…
It doesn't really mean much.
It just refers to someone with a lot of devoted followers.
That's about the extent of it.
A magazine drawing sweeping conclusions from a sample of just 3,000 people…
If you studied basic statistics you'd know that surveying even 3,000 people makes for a fairly reliable survey.
The issue with this kind of thing is never the sample size, it's whether the sampling method was biased (´・ω・`)
Most public opinion polls only survey 1,000-2,000 people lol.
3,000 is more than plenty — assuming it's random, anyway.
Who knows, they might be trashing Japan behind the scenes.
There was a stretch where this kept playing over and over even though nobody wanted to see it (´・ω・`)
[Message from President Takaichi] A Future Full of Hope edition
https://youtu.be/E8O1Ho1sdoo?si=CP5Vv_cZOwnZjOei
Never seen it.
Pretty sure that's the first time I've seen it lol.
I run an ad blocker, so…
Around election time there was someone on 5ch saying it kept showing up constantly for them, and I wondered why they didn't just block ads.
Though I get that ad blockers sometimes get bypassed on smartphones.
With fewer options, the other sources rank relatively higher by comparison.
I stopped subscribing to the newspaper too.
I still read news online, but I feel like a lot of young people don't even do that much.
https://images.forbesjapan.com/media/article/105768/images/editor/2532e722cba6357bdd51e8e0b9133553ff4bca19.jpg
Background and Key Points
Surveys on “trust in information sources” like this one tend to generate buzz largely because of how social media’s recommendation structures work. Since influencer income depends on follower counts and view numbers, their content skews toward sponsored promotions and extreme claims, both of which spread more easily — and audiences surrounded by the opinions of people they already follow fall into “echo chambers” more readily. Word-of-mouth from family and acquaintances, by contrast, is seen as more trustworthy precisely because there’s little financial interest involved and mistakes can be corrected face-to-face. Where the thread split was over NHK, with the “it’s public broadcasting so it’s trustworthy” camp and the “it’s politically biased” camp talking past each other. One thing easy to overlook here is that since views on NHK swing so much depending on political leanings, pulling out just the “high trust” figure from the survey obscures how varied viewers’ actual evaluation criteria really are. There was also a point raised in the thread that a sample of 3,000 is statistically sufficient as long as the sampling method is sound, and that dismissing the whole survey over sample size alone is premature.
※This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (News Express+) thread “The Two Least Trustworthy Information Sources: Why Influencer Social Media Flopped So Badly… The Most Trusted Are “Family Word-of-Mouth” and “NHK TV”…“
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