Roles of Social Media in Elections: Those Who Underpin SNS Activities / Campaign Planners Hired to Help Candidates Win Elections By Using Social Media in Possible Violation of Election Law

The Yomiuri Shimbun

21:00 JST, March 4, 2025

This is the second of a series of articles on social media’s impacts on elections from the perspective of those involved in election campaigns.

“If you use social media well, you’ll probably never lose a local assembly election,” said an Ehime-based campaign planner, 49.

The man entered the world of elections in 2018. He previously had taken jobs making social media ads for restaurants and other establishments, but after helping an acquaintance win an election, he gained recognition. In 2020, he began working as an independent campaign planner. He’s been involved in more than 50 elections and boasts a victory rate of more than 90%.

When Kana Shindo, 31, a former net idol, ran for Tokyo’s Minato Ward assembly election in April 2023, she asked the planner to work for her. Shindo created controversy when she ran in the 2020 Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly by-election over a campaign poster in which she wore as underwear cloth masks distributed by the government for COVID-19 prevention. She took last place in the by-election and also lost when she ran for mayor of Inzai City, Chiba Prefecture.

Shindo reportedly told the campaign planner: “I’m serious about winning the election this time.” The planner thought there was a definite chance of winning based on the strategies used. Based on his own experiences, he advises candidates to use individual social media differently based on their characteristics.

He said that Instagram is effective in local elections because by entering location data, it tends to be displayed on devices of those who open the app nearby. YouTube videos should be as short as possible, he said, as they are more likely to be recommended as related videos to other viewers if they are viewed until the end.

The number of views on Shindo’s videos was by far the largest among the candidates in Minato Ward’s assembly election. Among the 34 seats, she was successfully elected in 14th place. “The videos were more about quantity than quality,” Shindo said. “On social media, I focused on the issue of animal protection, which is appealing to voters. I spoke about other policies in my stump speeches.”

“I feel firsthand that elections have become increasingly like entertainment and that more and more people are getting information from social media,” the campaign planner said. “We are now in a time necessary to use social media [to win elections].”

Hiroshi Miura, 73, a former secretary to a lawmaker, who began his career in 1989, is believed to be the country’s first election planner, a position which gave pointers on election strategies. With social media’s impact on elections growing, those with limited political experience have begun entering the field.

On the other hand, the Public Offices Election Law prohibits the payment of remuneration for election campaigns in principle. In general, campaign planners work as “volunteers” during the election period, and candidates make payment for their advice on “political activities” unrelated to the election.

Shindo paid ¥990,000 to the Ehime-based campaign planner as a “support fee” for her political activities. Regardless of the name of the payment, if it is de facto compensation for election campaigning, it may be in violation of the Public Offices Election Law. However, the line is not clearly defined and the involvement of campaign planners is especially difficult to know with social media.

The outcome of Hyogo Prefecture’s gubernatorial election in November is said to have been impacted by social media. After Gov. Motohiko Saito was reelected, a representative of a publicity agency in the prefecture posted online that she had “supervised” Saito’s social media. As a result, criminal complaints have been filed against both Saito and the representative for allegedly violating the Public Offices Election Law.

The Saito camp denied any illegality, claiming that although it had paid the firm for poster design and other services, the representative worked as a “volunteer” for the election. The focus of the case is whether any substantial compensation for campaigning was paid to the firm.

“Every aspect of what campaign planners are doing is a gray area. They are using every trick they know,” said a campaign planner based in the Kanto region.

Some campaign planners will stop at nothing to win.

“I disseminate what may or may not be true based on the angle,” said a man in his 30s, who has been working as a Tokyo-based campaign planner for more than 10 years. “In the past, misinformation was spread by distributing suspicious documents, but now social media has taken over.”

He said he recently used social media to conduct a negative campaign against an opposing candidate in a local election in the Kyushu region. “Sometimes I pay overseas services to play a video tens of thousands of times to make it appear like a popular video in order to attract viewers’ attention,” he said.

“If we establish a mechanism to increase views, it’ll be possible to reproduce the phenomenon that occurred in the Hyogo gubernatorial election,” the man added.