Censorship?

Channel 2 Japan -Total Anonymity

I think I heard bout this website quite a long while back. Can't really remember how I came upon it. Just found it rather fascinating...
Some say that it's become a magnet for the malcontents of Japan, who'll announce their intentions on the website before committing the crimes. On any given day you can read messages about users' schemes to assault their bosses, murder their teachers or blow up a neighborhood kindergarten. Most are just hot air but a few actually carried out the acts they talked about in the website. The reason that it's so open's coz there's total anonymity in the website. Users does not even have a username. But the website's not just a site for the ravings of weirdos...

The bulletin board wasn't meant to be a soapbox for deranged malcontents but rather a rare haven for Japanese to discuss normally taboo subjects, like the yakuza, the royal family and discrimination against Koreans—topics the mainstream media either sanitizes or simply won't touch. "The Emperor is a war criminal. How is it that we haven't yet done away with the Imperial system?" asks an outspoken visitor to the history page. "In Japan, the press has had a monopoly over information," says Tomofumi Akiyama, a lawyer who specializes in multimedia law. "The Internet has opened the door for everyone to gather and transmit information."

Another interesting fact to consider would be the effect the website have on journalism in Japan.
Interview with Nishimura

"We once could only get information through mass media filters, such as newspaper companies or TV stations. We could send a letter with some kind of information disclosure to a newspaper, but whether they would pick it up in the papers depended on the editor's decisions. It can be said that only the information convenient to the media was reported.

However, there is a lot of interesting news that the mass media won't pick up. Let's say there is a person who wants to tell certain information, and then he posts it on Channel 2. If the news is really interesting, there should be people who are intrigued by it, then they will respond to it, getting more attention. It's the users who decide the value of the news on Channel 2.

There have been quite a few stories that the mass media picked up (from Channel 2) that became big stories. At the same time, Channel 2 has a role as an ombudsman, investigating mass media's reports. For example, some people objected to touching stories that TV stations reported, like "a female high school student started a social welfare business as a CEO," and "a brain-damaged boy developed an unusual talent, publishing books and poetry." They proved that mass media could make a mistake."

I think this website's rather interesting eh? Too bad i can't understand Japanese...
-_-