By Kyoko Kuwahara, March 27, 2025
The rapid development of generative AI technology has magnified the challenge of disinformation for countries across the democratic world. Compounding this challenge, the second Trump administration, together with the billionaire head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, has been taking measures to decrease, if not eliminate the disinformation countermeasures put in by previous governments and institutions in the US.
Other democratic countries will need to step into the leadership vacuum left by the United States. Japan, which is a member of the G7 along with Canada, aims to promote a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region, and in recent years has become increasingly aware that it lags behind Western countries countering disinformation. The Canada-Japan relationship is ripe for further co-operation in this area.
The impact of Musk and US President Donald Trump on online information spaces is significant, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year expressing his intention to end fact-checking on his platforms, citing the need to ensure “free speech.” With regard to X, Musk said in mid-February that Community Notes is “increasingly being gamed by governments and legacy media” to reinforce their own discourse, and X is now “working to fix this.”
The Trump administration’s “measures” against “disinformation countermeasures” will also make the efforts of private sector and civil society actors who have been engaged in countering disinformation more difficult. Private actors may weaken their approach to disinformation for fear of being accused of “censorship” by the Trump administration. As the US abandons its post-war leadership role on the global stage and fails to lead the fight against disinformation, international co-operation between other democracies combating disinformation will also become more challenging. Our adversaries, namely Russia and China, are surely pleased by these developments.
Japan, on the other hand, is strengthening its strategies to meet disinformation. In the past, Japan did very little to address it, whether from domestic sources or from foreign actors. Due to the language barrier, Japan’s long closed-door policy toward immigrants, and its relatively high level of trust in the traditional media, it has been more difficult for foreign actors to infiltrate the Japanese information environment.
However, a review of the history of disinformation in Japan reveals that it has long been a problem, especially mis- and disinformation that spread during natural disasters from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 to the Noto Peninsula Earthquake on New Year’s Day, 2024. False rumors and mis- and disinformation activities including copy and paste of images and videos of past disasters and completely unrelated events, deep fakes, rampant allegations of false crimes by foreigners, fictitious requests for rescue and assistance, and conspiracy theories have circulated and confused the disaster-stricken areas. The Japanese government and media are stepping up their efforts to alert the public to mis- and disinformation in times of disaster, but legal and regulatory measures to combat the act of spreading false information are not currently well developed in Japan.
Disinformation that spread following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the possible Taiwan Strait contingency, and the release of treated water by the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station into the ocean in 2023 are major wake-up calls for Japan. The water released by TEPCO has been treated through the Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS). TEPCO began discharging this ALPS treated water from the Nuclear Power Station into the ocean in August 2023. Prior to the discharge, the Japanese government announced that the safety of the water had been confirmed and was within international regulatory standards with the involvement of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and third-country analytical laboratories. However, China strongly condemned Japan’s policy and conducted information influence operations, crafting a false narrative around particular words, such as “radioactive water” and “nuclear-contaminated wastewater,” which were likely intended to damage Japan’s reputation in the world.
In light of this, Japan started strengthening its countermeasures against foreign disinformation campaigns. The Japanese government has led the fight against disinformation, and has recently stepped up a cross-governmental effort to counter it since December 2022 as part of the newly adopted National Security Strategy. The government bolstered its ability to respond to “information warfare in the cognitive domain, including spread of disinformation” by aggregating and analyzing disinformation originating abroad, strengthening internal communications and a “debunking” approach, and enhancing co-operation with non-governmental actors.
The government is also trying to align itself with Western democracies through frameworks such as the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM), the Japan-EU Security Defence Partnership and the Japan-NATO cooperation on strategic communications.
However, the government-led approach to counter disinformation has some shortfalls. Firstly, the countermeasures focus heavily on foreign disinformation campaigns, while mis- and disinformation originating domestically, which spreads online during natural disasters, for example, have also become a serious social issue.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has been the main actor in initiating measures against online mis- and disinformation originating in Japan and has launched initiatives such as a public-private partnership project “Digital Positive Action” since January 2025. This action covers 19 organization from private sector, including platform companies, and aims to improve ICT literacy among Japanese users. The MIC is also a leading agency for the implementation of the new Act on Information Distribution Platforms Response (情報流通プラットフォーム対処法) promulgated in May 2024, which will require platform companies to respond quickly to illegal postings such as slander and privacy violations. The ministry has begun to take steps to address such societal issues, but these efforts have tended to focus primarily on illegal postings at this moment, and much broader actions should be pursued.
Secondly, while the debunking approach, which exposes and refutes false information when it has already been circulated, has been widely adopted in disinformation countermeasures in Japan, a “prebunking” approach, an inoculation approach that preemptively communicates to the receptive audience before false information spreads, has not been much practiced, although the importance of such measures is growing in many parts of the world.
Addressing disinformation cannot be done solely by the government, and a whole of society approach, which generally involves government, private sector, and civil society organizations (CSOs), is yet to be developed in Japan. There has been a growing trend among fact-checkers and traditional media to address disinformation issues through the development of open source intelligence and AI tools for information aggregation and analysis. However, the number of such non-government actors and efforts are limited, and there is little collaboration across sectors.
Japan needs to change its perceptions of disinformation. It is not a distant threat from abroad anymore. The dramatic advancement of AI technology will overcome the Japanese language barrier that has long insulated Japan from foreign disinformation campaigns. In order to consider more effective measures, it is essential to accumulate research, and enhance the analytical capabilities required to understand the information ecosystem of Japanese society – especially to identify vulnerable audiences for controversial topics.
Recognizing that the current defensive “debunking” approach will not be effective in countermeasures, relevant government institutions must promote more preemptive “prebunking” to build social resilience. Various efforts by private sector and CSOs, including data-driven research, technology development, communications, education, and quality improvement of journalism and fact-checking, should be expanded and co-operation should be strengthened.
However, it will be challenging for Japan to immediately implement such a proactive approach without international co-operation. Japan just signed a Memorandum of Cooperation (MOC) on foreign information manipulation with the US State Department in December 2023, but the US is dramatically changing under the Trump administration. It is not clear whether co-operation frameworks such as the US-Japan MOC and G7 RRM will continue to work.
Canada could be a valuable partner in combatting disinformation and FIMI. Canada has recently stepped up its efforts against foreign interference from Russia and China. Canada’s Digital Citizen Initiative is exemplary.
Canada is also increasing its broader involvement in the Indo-Pacific region based on its Indo-Pacific Strategy, and is implementing a deeper multifaceted co-operation with Taiwan, including measures to counter disinformation.
Both Japan and Canada should build partnerships with reliable partner actors through bilateral and multilateral co-operation. At the government level, coordination could include sharing information on threat actors and contentious topics in each information environment as well as best practices among data analysts, moving on a more practical level of co-operation. At the level of the private sector and CSOs, there is also room for co-operation in facilitating quantitative and qualitative research collaborations for situational awareness and risk analysis, as well as in the development of AI tools.
In the wake of America pulling out from leadership in this space, it is important to create a more dynamic international network, one that will also include the private sector and CSOs. Canada is ahead of Japan in its experience with and efforts to combat disinformation; exploring engagement with various Canadian players would offer a wide range of possibilities for Japan.
Kyoko Kuwahara is a fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.