cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/8668490

Archived version

Pro-China entities have attempted to use disinformation to undermine democracy and social cohesion in Japan. This has included targeting Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and her government through state media, diplomatic channels and coordinated online campaigns across the Indo-Pacific region. Japanese authorities have responded by expanding fact-checking and issuing rebuttals backed by authenticated information. But government agencies presently have few powers to block content, punish those spreading disinformation, or publicly attribute attacks to foreign state actors. Japan would benefit from studying and working with Australia as it considers how best to strengthen counter-disinformation powers as part of wider security reforms.

China has been spreading anti-Takaichi disinformation across the region to influence public opinion. Early this year, a false narrative spread in Taiwan claiming that Takaichi’s grandfather was a soldier during the Japanese invasion of China and was involved in executions by beheading. This disinformation sought to not only confuse voters in Japan but also sway public opinion in Taiwan, illustrating how a single fabricated narrative can be simultaneously weaponised across multiple audiences in different countries.

This wave of disinformation correlates with Beijing’s wider attempts to coerce Japan, particularly since Takaichi took a robust stance over Taiwan.

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Japan’s legal framework for combating disinformation is still relatively underdeveloped compared to other peer democratic countries, including Australia. There are presently no direct criminal penalties for spreading disinformation, nor provisions for confiscating illicit profits derived from it. When disinformation causes harm to a specific individual or organisation, it is addressed indirectly under existing penal code provisions – defamation, fraud, or obstruction of business by fraudulent means. While Japan may not need new and dedicated provisions, it would at the very least need to update existing provisions so that they specifically address state-backed information manipulation.

Currently, Japan’s Public Offices Election Act provides powers to intervene if disinformation threatens electoral integrity, but those powers are harder to invoke when disinformation targets public opinion about government policy rather than election candidates. Even if a disinformation campaign has severe negative impact, authorities can only request, not mandate, that platforms remove content. This creates a structural asymmetry: foreign state actors can act with speed and scale while Japanese authorities are constrained to polite requests.

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Critically, neither country has yet perfectly cracked the hardest problem: how democratic governments can act swiftly against state-backed disinformation campaigns without empowering the same legal machinery that authoritarian states misuse to silence dissent. Australia and Japan already consult and cooperate on this challenge, but the pace and complexity of modern information operations, increasingly turbocharged by AI, are outrunning existing mechanisms. The task now is to elevate and embed that cooperation, so it becomes structural rather than episodic. That means deepening permanent working-level channels between agencies. It also means drawing in civil society researchers and specialist private-sector firms in both countries that are often detecting and analysing AI-enabled disinformation campaigns faster than governments can.

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