Abstract

Reports on the murder of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, even after details on the perpetrator’s Twitter account were made public, reinforce ideas that 1) the perpetrator’s motives were not inherently political and 2) stem from a personal grudge against the Unification Church and the belief that Abe Shinzō was deeply tied to this group. Through a mixed-method content and discourse analysis of his Twitter account, we find that 1) the perpetrator’s worldview is distinctly political and ties into the belief systems associated with online right-wing and misogynist sub-cultural communities, and 2) his account reads as a fragmented manifesto combining self-victimized accounts of his past intertwined with the above political views. Based on these findings, we argue that the perpetrator’s actions are driven both by his political beliefs and by a sense of manifest destiny and urgency we associate with internet-radicalized terrorists and the highly networked communities driving them.

Citation

Poppe, S. (2022). “From Y”: A mixed-method analysis of the Twitter Account of Abe Shinzō’s killer. Retrieved from: https://www.digital-japan.org/2022/08/19/analysis-of-the-twitter-account-of-abe-shinzos-killer/