Newly appointed Minister of the Environment found following adult-oriented Twitter accounts

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To his credit, this is one of the more advanced tech problems a Japanese politician has experienced.

Earlier this week Japan welcomed its 100th Prime Minister Fumio Kishida into office. As a part of the change came a cabinet shuffle in which Shinjiro Koizumi was replaced as Minister of the Environment.

Koizumi had certainly left his mark, however, having implemented a charge on plastic shopping bags which is said to have reduced plastic consumption nationwide. He was also famous for having notoriously vowed to make the fight against climate change “sexy” in 2019. His use of a rather common English expression to “make something sexy” in the sense of making it more exciting and appealing, was a little hard for some Japanese people to grasp. As a result, they assumed Koizumi was speaking in a more literal sense and he was accidentally seen as a bit of an odd-ball.

▼ A whole news report on the former minister’s use of the word “sexy” and the government’s reaction to it

Koizumi’s replacement, 67-year-old veteran politician Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, looked like he would bring a more sobering influence to the role of environment minister. That is, until only one day into his term Twitter users found that he totally out-sexied Koizumi by a long shot.

▼ “Is @244yamaguchi the right account for Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, the newly appointed environment minister to replace Shinjiro Koizumi? If it is, he follows a surprising amount of sexy accounts.”

This Twitter user and others continued to post several screenshots of Twitter accounts that Yamaguchi followed and featured photos and videos of large-breasted women prominently such as, but not limited to, the “Japan Big Tits Review Blog.” Some other accounts offered looks at large breasts in exchange for money in their bios.

When the news of these online connections broke, Yamaguchi was following 96 Twitter accounts, but this number has since been purged to 11, including his hometown’s tourism association and, interestingly enough, The Daily Show, along with its host Trevor Noah.

J-Cast News reached out to the office of Yamaguchi, who explained the cause of this really horny-looking following list. It would appear that it was a combination of popular methods sometimes used to help artificially build a Twitter following.

First, Yamaguchi followed a “follow-back account,” which is an account that simply exchanges follows and nothing more. Some people use these to boost their own follower-count, and it’s possible that the follow-back account solicited Yamaguchi for the follow through a DM request.

▼ Japanese follow-back accounts such as the one below can easily be found by searching “相互フォロー”

At that time, the follow-back account appeared relatively normal, but at some point after it and Yamguchi began following each other, the account converted to large-breast content in order to boost its own number of followers, all unbeknownst to Yamaguchi.

Meanwhile, Yamaguchi’s account was also using a service that auto-follows some, but not all, of the accounts that were following Yamaguchi. The service seemed to have deciding which accounts to auto-follow based on the types of accounts Yamaguchi was already following. Since Yamaguchi was following a relatively small number of accounts compared to his number of followers, when the follow-back account switched to large breast content the auto-follow service appears to have decided that large breasts must be a major interest of Yamaguchi’s, triggering it to start automatically following other accounts with similar content that previously wouldn’t have gotten past its filter.

The story seems reasonable, since the adult content found on his list was oddly similar and specific to large Japanese breasts. In addition, Yamaguchi’s own posts show he was never really an avid Twitter user, averaging about one tweet a month, so he likely never paid much attention to his home timeline.

▼ “Olympics, table tennis, Mizutani’s tenacity, there are many things to inspire us.” [Yamaguchi’s only tweet in the month of July]

And so, it looks like the new minister got a crash course in the importance of protecting his social media environment, but for a brief time truly did make the fight against climate change sexier than it’s ever been.

Source: J-Cast News, Hachima Kiko
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