| Abstract |

The social media industry, despite its vast membership, has experienced a significant decline in advertisement revenue since 2022, leading to mass layoffs. These cutbacks have also affected content moderators responsible for regulating hateful content. In this situation, user engagement becomes an indispensable part of content moderation, particularly in addressing online hate speech. This guest lecture focuses on Japanese internet users who have taken on the challenging task of systematically reporting online hate speech and other forms of hateful content to social media companies. It addresses two questions: (1) What types of users participate in such user engagement? (2) What motivates and sustains Twitter users in their engagement?
   To address these questions, the #Internet Rightists Ban Festival (Netto-uyo Ban Matsuri) is selected as the Japanese case study. Launched in May 2018, this collective action has continued to the present day, resulting in the removal of over 990,800 videos and 4,000 channels from YouTube, as well as the deletion of more than 270 million tweets and 11,000 accounts from Twitter.
   The lecture will begin by providing background information on the Japanese case study, including the Japanese internet culture, which is marked by cynicism and gamification, and the analytical framework offered by the German case study since 2016 (#ichbinhier). In the main part, the lecture will present the results of a qualitative content analysis of 3,821 tweets posted in 2018 and 2020, examining three determinants of user engagement against hateful content proposed by scholars specializing in the German case study.
   The lecture argues that Japanese user engagement has been driven particularly by the perception of personal abilities, including gaming and comment-writing skills, as well as the perception of personal benefits, especially derived from gamification and irony.   

| Bio |

Ayaka Löschke (ayaka.loeschke@fau.de) is a Junior Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg since 2019. She holds an MA in Philosophy from Sophia University in Tokyo (2008), a second MA in Philosophy from the University of Bonn (2012). In 2013, she changed her major from philosophy to social scientific Japanese studies. She obtained a PhD in Japanese Studies from the University of Zurich in 2018. Her research fields encompass Japanese politics, civil society, and social movements, with a specific focus on the regulation of hate speech in Japan (ongoing project) and the legacies of post-Fukushima activism aimed at protecting people from radiation (dissertation project).

| Date & Time |

u:japan lecture | s06e13
Thursday 2023-06-22, 18:30~20:00
max. 50 participants (on site) + max. 300 participants (online) 

| Place & Preparations | 

| Plattform & Link |

| Further Questions? |

Please contact ujapanlectures.ostasien@univie.ac.at or visit https://japanologie.univie.ac.at/ujapanlectures/s06/#e13.