Report from Nippon.com
In Brief – Japan’s House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the Diet, has approved two bills by a majority vote that are intended to address the misuse of social media during election campaigns. The bills, which must next be considered by the Diet’s upper chamber, are expected to be enacted before the current session ends in July. They are likely to go into force before next spring’s unified local elections. One of the bills calls for amending the public offices election law to make social media users responsible for not harming the fairness of elections through misinformation and disinformation, including by disclosing when videos and images are generated by artificial intelligence. The other bill calls for revising the information distribution platform law to oblige social media operators to take measures to reduce adverse effects on elections and report on their implementation every year.
Context – As Japan’s new regulation of the Google and Apple app stores shows, they prefer to follow the lead of others on digital regulation. In this case, the EU’s 2022 Digital Services Act regulates how platforms address “any actual or foreseeable negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes”. EU regulators have pressed the large digital platforms on election-related processes for several years, including roundtables and stress-tests before the 2024 EU Parliament elections and the 2025 German election, and directly intervening in the 2024 Romanian election. Earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macron called on Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to fully use the DSA to counter alleged foreign election interference in 2026’s 11 elections and major 2027 elections in France, Italy and Poland, including limiting algorithmic virality, labeling AI-generated material, and ensuring transparency in political advertising. Nothing gets the Trump Administration more animated on digital policy than the perception that establishment political leaders in Europe use online regulation to hamstring local conservative populists who have increasingly built alliances with US organizations and leaders.