Less than a month away from the Upper House election, parties worried about misinformation and defamatory content regarding candidates spreading online are seeking help from social media platforms while hinting at new legislation if corporate actions fall short.
Lawmakers from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party met with representatives from X, Google and LY — operator of Line and Yahoo services — in May, requesting that they delete false or defamatory content about candidates on the same day it is uploaded, and to suspend any payouts to the accounts posting it.
Social media platforms are exempt from liability when removing posts if creators do not respond in seven days, under the information distribution platform law, which took effect in April. Exceptions apply to posts defaming political candidates, for which the grace period is reduced to two days.
Lawmakers, however, say two days is too long.
“When election day is around the corner, we’ll take on losses if social media platforms don’t delete (false or defamatory) posts about us candidates. Maybe we’ll even lose in a race we thought we could win. In situations like these, we want them to deal with it immediately,” said Lower House lawmaker Ichiro Aisawa, chairperson of the LDP’s research commission on the election system.
Such was the case for Kazumi Inamura, the runner-up in November’s Hyogo gubernatorial election, who was falsely accused by an anonymous X user of supporting voting rights for foreign nationals and proposing a ¥100 billion plan to rebuild the prefectural government building.
Inamura, backed by some LDP prefectural assembly members, “clearly took a hit” from the spread of “complete lies,” said Aisawa.
Each social media platform is left to self-regulate, for now.
Google, which operates YouTube, deletes content that violates its misinformation policies and permanently removes channels that receive three strikes within 90 days of the first warning.
In the first quarter of 2025, 63,487 videos were deleted in Japan. Over 8.6 million videos worldwide were deleted — 0.3% due to misinformation — with over 2.8 million channels removed — 2.3% due to misinformation. Google did not disclose what percentage of this content was related to elections.
LY also deletes content that violates the rules of its services, including Yahoo Chiebukuro, a Q&A community similar to Quora. Repeat offenders are suspended from posting more content and earning money on the vertical short-form video platform Line Voom.
In fiscal 2024, over 444,000, 0.7% of Yahoo Chiebukuro posts were deleted, with about 1,000 cases of suspended activity. For Line Voom, about 3 million or 0.8% of videos were deleted, with about 128,000 cases of suspended activity. The company did not disclose what percentage of this content was misinformation or election-related.
Line Voom, however, does not attract users who seek to profit from political content and sensational misinformation due to LY’s strict review of applicants who meet the monetization criteria, said LY media chief Hideyuki Makimoto.
“LY’s services are different from other social media platforms, like X, Facebook and Instagram. Our services aren’t built in a way that makes it easy for people spreading false information to gain prominence like influencers do,” said Makimoto.
“I spoke about this in parliament, too, but LY’s screening process is very rigorous, especially but not only for political content. For example, copyright issues for highlight clips. Even if a political candidate told people to share clips of their videos, LY can’t be sure about who the copyrights belong to. So we don’t allow it, because it’s profitable.”
Makimoto also said that implementing lawmakers’ proposed policies in uniform will prove to be challenging as each platform provider operates with a different system and approach to monetization and copyright issues.
Lawmakers did not submit a bill for tougher social media policies before parliament wrapped up on Sunday, leaving the coming election at risk of misinformation.
“If companies (running) major platforms are only going to present measures that we deem insufficient, we’ll maybe need to enact a law to regulate (social media),” said Aisawa.
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