December 1, 2016
Recently our curation platform service has attracted a variety of criticism, and as the president and CEO I would like to provide more information about how we reached this point.
As CEO, I am responsible for the service reaching this state. My lack of oversight has caused issues for our users, advertisers, partners, and many others, and I would like to sincerely apologize for damaging the trust you've all placed in us.
We have been severely criticized for allowing some articles with medical information with insufficient medical grounds to be posted on our healthcare curation website WELQ, without review from medical professionals. Providing such information in a way that was inappropriate to the sensitivity of the subject matter was a major mistake, and on realization, we decided, on November 29, to withdraw all articles posted on WELQ.
Additionally, it has been pointed out that the process for creating our articles for all our curation media, including WELQ, was problematic. Questions have also arisen concerning responsibility for posted articles.
We have very carefully considered these points, and reviewed the state of our operations. In nine of our media that share the same operating structure and policies (WELQ, iemo, Find Travel, cuta, UpIn, CAFY, JOOY, GOIN, and PUUL), some parts of our manual and directions to writers could be interpreted as suggesting plagiarizing other websites. I cannot view this as being morally correct.
We decided that we should not continue to provide or allow further articles to be created under our current process, so we decided to withdraw all articles from these nine media today at 6 p.m. (Japan Standard Time). Going forward, I personally will serve as the head of the Curation Management Committee and oversee the review of our article creation process and its contents to date for all of our media, including MERY. Further, I promise to fundamentally change our operations of these media and create a process which I can completely place my faith in.
It was my naiveté that did not allow us to respond in a timely manner to this situation, which allowed the problem to grow to such a significant scale. I would like to deeply apologize that it took me so long to address this issue.
My responsibility for these events is heavy, so in order to make the management responsibility clearer, I have decided to reduce my salary by 30% for 6 months; however, that will not be all. It is my top priority to fulfill my promise of improving the operations of our media.
We deeply regret having caused this situation and having broken the trust of so many people. We are reflecting on our actions and will do our very best to reverse the damage that has been caused.
Isao Moriyasu
