Elections and Social Media: Urgent Reform Needed to Ensure Fairness

Editorial

16:04 JST, February 7, 2025

There has been a spate of serious incidents in which information of unknown veracity on social media has affected the outcome of elections. The act of candidates running in an election to support another candidate, with no aim of winning themselves, cannot also be overlooked.

To maintain the fairness and impartiality of elections, the government and the ruling and opposition parties need to be swift in taking measures, including legal regulations.

The ruling Liberal Democratic Party has compiled points for discussion related to the regulation of social media during elections, and has presented these to other parties. The LDP intends to revise the law to allow political parties and candidates to ask operators of social media sites to remove false information on the day, when they confirm such information on the sites.

Under the current law, site operators that receive a request for removal are supposed to contact the poster and then delete the post if they do not receive a response of disagreement from the poster within two days.

In reality, however, in many cases, the operators are unable to reach posters because they are anonymous. To clarify the responsibility of operators, it is essential to understand who the posters are.

In last year’s Hyogo gubernatorial election, social media sites were flooded with disinformation. The mechanism of social media, where the more views a video gets, the more advertising revenue it earns, have encouraged such postings.

For this reason, the LDP intends to allow operators to refuse to pay out ad money for election-related posts of unknown veracity and for them to not be held liable for compensation if they refuse to pay.

The latest Hyogo gubernatorial election was also marred by a so-called double-horsepower campaign, in which one candidate supported another. The LDP has proposed legal regulations against such a candidacy, but some members of opposition parties were cautious about the proposal, saying that the definition of a “double-horsepower” campaign was unclear.

The Public Offices Election Law strictly regulates the number of campaign vehicles and leaflets a candidate can use. If that number were doubled, the amount of campaigning would increase significantly.

In last year’s Tokyo gubernatorial election, the rights to put up posters in the allotted spaces on election boards were effectively sold, and the boards were flooded with advertisements for adult entertainment establishments. The ruling and opposition parties plan to revise the law by next month to prohibit the use of posters for commercial purposes.

In supplementary provisions for the relevant bill, the LDP also is considering specifying the direction of reform for social media regulations, including for the deletion of postings. The party hopes that this will have the effect of preventing confusion during this summer’s elections for the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly and the House of Councillors.

It is not just election campaigning that is being warped. The election system itself has been heavily distorted. It is often argued that candidates tend to rely on voter sentiment trends under the current election system, which combines single-seat constituencies and proportional representation, and that Diet members have become mediocre.

In addition, in light of judicial rulings stressing correcting vote-value disparities, the Diet has been working to change the zoning of constituencies, among other measures. As a result, the number of lawmakers elected from regional constituencies has continued to decline. If this trend continues, only voters in major cities will have a voice in politics. Is this appropriate?

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Feb. 7, 2025)