Roles of Social Media in Elections: Those Who Underpin SNS Activities / System for Verifying Authentic Materials Still Fragile

The Yomiuri Shimbun

21:00 JST, March 5, 2025

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

On June 11 last year, only nine days before campaigning for the Tokyo gubernatorial election was due to kick off, a 57-second video footage was posted on X — formerly known as Twitter — with a flashy caption reading, “Yuriko’s dictatorship.”

The video clip begins with a male assembly member questioning Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike at a meeting of a budget special committee at the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly. The member is saying that Koike is refusing to answer questions.

Other assembly members in attendance submitted a motion to strike the member’s remarks, deeming them inappropriate. The member was asked to leave the room by the committee chair. When he was leaving, he complained that his removal was an “infringement of freedom of speech.”

At first glance, this video seems to show that the member was asked to leave his seat for criticizing Koike. However, a staff member of the Japan Fact-check Center (JFC) suspected that the video might be a fake and began checking its authenticity.

The JFC staff member contacted the Secretariat to the Assembly, who said that there is a city ordinance which stipulates that assembly members cannot, in principle, participate in proceedings that concern themselves. It was also learned that the committee member had left the room while the motion was being discussed but returned to his seat after the vote.

On June 20, when campaigning for the election officially began, the JFC published an article on its website saying that the posting was “inaccurate.” They pointed out that while it was true the assembly member in question did leave his seat, the allegation that “Gov. Koike had forced an assembly member critical of her to leave” was misleading.

By the time the JFC’s article had been published, the post with the video had been viewed 650,000 times. Critical comments flooded in, accusing Koike of being a “crazy dictator,” and calling to “get her voted out.” In the end, Koike won the election.

“Unless we stop the manipulation of impressions on social media quickly, it could affect the outcome of an election. Fact-checking is a race against time,” the JFC staff member said.

Fact-checking is a way to verify the authenticity of information that floods social media. “There is a huge amount of false information, and in many cases it is impossible to verify,” said Daisuke Furuta, the 47-year-old editor-in-chief of JFC, emphasizing the difficulties in carrying out fact checks.

JFC checks publicly released political information, such as parliamentary proceedings and video footage of press conferences, to determine whether the information is either “accurate,” “mostly accurate,” “inaccurate,” “erroneous,” or “baseless.” The organization has 11 staff members, including Furuta. During the House of Representatives election last year, they were able to publish a total of 28 verified articles.

As manpower is low, it is difficult to verify posts that require insider information or highly specialized knowledge.

“False information can be posted within a minute, but it takes time to prove that it is a lie,” said Furuta. “Still, by continuing to carry out fact-checking and having people read [our] verification articles, we hope that more people will be able to determine which information is dubious.”

There are only three Japanese organizations, including the JFC, which are members of the international fact-checking organization, showing that the domestic system for verifying false information remains weak.

Verification articles are made public free of charge, so fact-checking organizations have to rely only on donations from platform operators and individuals. Concerns over financing constantly hover over the groups.

LITMUS, a general incorporated association, formed a partnership last September with the Japanese subsidiary of U.S.-based Meta, which manages Facebook, Instagram and other social networking services. In addition to donations, LITMUS receives fees for fact-checking of postings and advertisements on social media.

However, Meta announced in January this year it would end third-party fact-checking partnerships in the United States. Tomoya Ohtani, the 38-year-old chief editor of LITMUS, has growing concerns, saying, “We don’t know when our partnership will be discontinued.”

In South Korea, the fact-checking center at Seoul National University suspended its activities last August after a major IT company ended its financial support.

“As false information spreads widely, especially during elections, we need to improve our fact-checking activities. But there is a limit to what we can do on our own,” said Ohtani.