Suspicions are rising that Russia may be manipulating information via social media during the Upper House election campaign as voters prepare to head to the polls on Sunday.
The allegations came to light when a blog post by Ichiro Yamamoto, a member of the think tank Japan Institute of Law and Information Systems, went viral on Tuesday. In it, he said anti-government propaganda by Russian bot accounts was what made the small far-right party Sanseito so popular leading up to the election.
Yamamoto raised concerns that Saya, a Sanseito candidate in the Tokyo district, appeared in an interview on Sputnik, a Russian government-affiliated news agency, on Monday.
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