“Impression Zombies” Are Making Japanese Social Media Worse
They’re making the service harder to use — and spreading dangerous misinformation.
By Jay Andrew Allen
The monetization of X, one of Japan’s most-used social networking platforms, has had some unfortunate externalities. One is the uptick in accounts — most from outside of Japan — clogging up replies of popular accounts and posting sensationalistic content with the intent of going viral. Japanese users have dubbed them “impression zombies” (インプレゾンビ, inpure zombi).
At their most harmless, the impression zombies make X harder to navigate. At their worst, however, they can spread dangerous disinformation.
Impression zombies: Trash for cash
The stock-in-trade of impression zombies is twofold. The first is copying popular content from social media and re-posting it as their own — i.e., the traditional content theft that’s rampant on social networks.
The other is posting nonsense replies on threads that have gone viral. These can range from an emoji to nonsense Japanese text like 「ここでは毎日が新しい物語です」(“every day here is a new chapter.”)
