Japan Enacts Bills to Fight Election Misinformation

Tokyo, July 13 (Jiji Press)–The Diet, Japan’s parliament, on Monday enacted bills designed to strengthen measures against false information about elections on social media. The bills to revise the public offices election law and the information distribution platform law were approved at a plenary meeting of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the Diet, following their passage by the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, last month. With some exceptions, the revised laws will come into effect on March 1 next year and be applied to unified local elections expected in next April. The revised public offices election law clearly states the responsibility of social media users to prevent false information from damaging the fairness of elections. It mandates that images and videos created using artificial intelligence must be labeled as such. The amended information distribution platform law stipulates that information platform operators must take measures to mitigate the adverse effects of misinformation and information that violates election-related laws and regulations, and are required to publicly disclose the status of their implementation annually. The internal affairs minister is to establish guidelines for these measures. The special committees on political reform of both chambers of the Diet adopted a supplementary resolution. As specific examples of the measures, the resolution calls for suspending monetization for social media users who violate the terms of use and giving priority to displaying reliable information such as official websites. However, since the decision on which measures to implement is left to the service providers and there are no penalties, concerns were raised during the Diet deliberations regarding the bills’ effectiveness. Ichiro Aisawa, an LDP lawmaker who was among the sponsors of the bills, said that the revised laws are designed to encourage the implementation of appropriate and effective measures through social evaluation of information platform service providers and users’ choice of platforms. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]