A pop-up window on Yahoo! Japan News, informing you that you must register your mobile phone number to comment. I teach peace studies at a university in Tokyo, Japan. Every year, when students are asked where they usually watch the news, the Japanese ‘Yahoo! News’ and ‘Line News’ were the most common answers. Many students use social networking services (SNS) and online communities to search for information. Once I asked students: “While using the Internet, what do you think is a problem?” The answer was ‘slander/slander beyond the limit’, and the overwhelming majority of the lamentations were ‘someone died because of malicious comments’. From mid-November 2022, Japan’ Yahoo! To write a comment on ‘News’, you must register your mobile phone number. Previously, Yahoo Japan has been using manpower and artificial intelligence (AI) to check comments 24 hours a day and delete comments that spread personal information or malicious comments (hate comments). The comment function for news with serious problems was closed, and from June 2018, the use of IDs repeating malicious comments was suspended. However, when these measures were not very effective, the river called ‘enter a mobile phone number’ was placed. The trend of increasing damage caused by malicious comments is clear. According to the “Illegal and Harmful Information Consultation Center” commissioned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan, the number of consultations was 1337 the year the center was launched in 2010, but in 2021 it increased by about 4.7 times to 6329 cases. As for the main contents of consultation (2021), privacy issues, including leakage of personal information such as address, phone number, and e-mail, and infringement of portrait rights in photos and videos (digital crime), were the most common with 3964 cases (62.6%). Next, 2558 cases (40.4%) of damage to reputation and credit, 667 cases of illegal information, and 212 cases of copyright infringement (including duplicate responses). Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Line are among the top operators in the number of consultations. As malicious comments increased like this, Yahoo Japan made it mandatory to register mobile phone numbers. We took into account the fact that more than half of the IDs that were banned from using comments had unregistered phone numbers, and that there were many cases in which multiple IDs continued to post malicious comments. Yahoo Japan expects that this measure, which requires users to register their cell phone numbers, will act as a psychological deterrent and reduce malicious comments. However, it is unclear whether this measure will reduce malicious comments as much as Yahoo Japan expects. According to the results of a survey conducted for members by Bengosi.com, Japan’s largest legal consultation portal service, in January 2022, 176 out of 1355 respondents answered that they had slandered or slandered on the Internet. Among them, 47% were men in their 40s and 50s. When asked about motivation, there were many responses like this. ‘I thought it was a legitimate criticism or comment (51.5%)’ ‘Relieves irritation (34.1%)’ ‘To harass the other person (22.7%)’ ‘I believed false or untrue information to be true (9.1%)’ . In many cases, they were unaware that their actions were wrong in the first place. In Japan, the Provider Liability Limitation Act came into effect in October 2022. It drastically reduced the cumbersome procedure and time required to disclose the information of the perpetrator who wrote severe malicious comments. Until then, in order to respond to malicious comments, it was necessary to file a separate trial with telecommunications companies to find out the information of the ‘bad guys’, and it took at least four months to disclose the information. However, with the revision of the law, that period has been greatly shortened. From the first case since the law went into effect, decisions were made quickly. On October 3, 2022, Tomorrowgate filed a lawsuit seeking the disclosure of the information of a person who had repeatedly posted posts alleging that one of its employees had ties to gangs. On October 6, the Tokyo District Court ordered Twitter to provide information. The will of the court, which made the decision to provide information in three days, is evident. Experts expected that the revision of the law would greatly reduce the burden on victims of malicious comments. Prior to this, in June 2022, the Criminal Act was amended to increase the statutory penalty for insult as a measure to reduce damage caused by slander and slander on the Internet. This is the result of the exercise led by the family of Hana Kimura, a professional wrestler who committed suicide in 2020 after suffering from malicious comments and insults on social media. Japanese journalist Shiori Ito.ⓒEPA Malicious comment regulation is a double-edged sword On October 22, 2022, the first ruling was made to compensate for damages, saying that clicking ‘Like’ on someone else’s tweet that insults an individual constitutes an insult. . Japanese freelance journalist Shiori Ito filed a lawsuit against Mio Sugita, member of the House of Representatives of the Liberal Democratic Party, who “liked” 25 tweets defaming her in June and July 2018. Rep. Sugita attacked Ito as a liar, who revealed his identity, accused the perpetrator of sexual assault, and attacked Ito as a liar, and eagerly clicked ‘Like’ on the tweet of another person who criticized Ito. The Tokyo High Court ruled that Sugita was influential as an active lawmaker with 110,000 Twitter followers, and that the number of ‘likes’ and past words and actions were ‘defamation of honor’, and ordered Ito to pay 550,000 yen. Mio Sugita, a member of the House of Representatives, was sentenced to defamation by “liking” a tweet criticizing Ito. While laws and systems are being prepared to deal with malicious comments like this, there are not a few voices criticizing them. ‘Yahoo! News’ users order to weed out articles or writers that slander, slander, or slander a specific ethnic group or community before blaming malicious comments. Rep. Mio Sugita is one of those people. Rep. Sugita, who was appointed by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said she was a “comfort woman” for the Japanese military and a “female figure” who denied the Nanjing Massacre, making statements that violated the human rights of women and sexual minorities. She is also very concerned that state power may abuse the relevant laws. It has been pointed out that the offense of insult violates freedom of expression by shrinking legitimate criticism from the time it was enacted. In addition, there are no exceptions such as ‘in case of public interest’ in the revised provisions related to the offense of insult. This means that the people’s right to know and freedom of expression can be undermined. Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture Bar Association issued a statement saying that even in the case of criticism related to public interests, such as criticism of public officials such as members of the National Assembly and heads of local governments, there is a risk of punishment if it contains a sign of contempt for the target.
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If I leave my phone number, will I not leave malicious comments?
