The steady increase in online content influencing public opinion reached a “turning point” in Japan in 2024.

Eleven years have passed since Japan lifted the ban on internet-based election campaigning. And as two local elections showed this year, voters, particularly younger ones, are relying more on social media than mainstream media for information on candidates.

And success can also be gained through the work of people who are not even supporters of the candidate.

Shinji Ishimaru, a former mayor of Akitakata in Hiroshima Prefecture, was not well-known in Tokyo.

And in mainstream media coverage of the Tokyo gubernatorial election in July, candidate Ishimaru took a backseat to the perceived “showdown” between incumbent Yuriko Koike and popular opposition party veteran Renho.

However, Ishimaru placed runner-up to Koike with 1.65 million votes, ahead of Renho.

In Hyogo Prefecture, a governor’s election was called after Motohiko Saito was forced from the post over allegations of power harassment and corruption.

In his quest for re-election, Saito continued to be painted in a negative light in newspaper and TV reports.

Both Ishimaru and Saito, who was re-elected in November, focused their campaigns on online content. And the strategy proved successful. 

‘BIASED COVERAGE’

A 22-year-old company employee in Kobe said his impression of Saito began to change at the end of September, following nearly daily news reports about the allegations against the governor.

The man recalled a TV report immediately after Saito lost his job in September.

“Originally, I didn’t have a good image of him,” the man said. “But when I saw (the TV news report) slamming Saito for standing alone at a train station, I thought the (media coverage) was biased.”

Once the gubernatorial election campaign kicked off, he began to see Saito’s speeches played frequently on TikTok.

Seeing the reactions of those around him, the man came to feel that Saito “is not as bad as people say.”

He said he voted for Saito.

Newspaper and television coverage of the election campaign was limited, and little information about the other candidates was seen on social networking sites, he said.

However, videos of Saito were streamed in large numbers every day, he said.

A 36-year-old man who lives in Nara Prefecture was one of the creators of such videos.

He started a YouTube channel in summer 2023 and became obsessed with “the fun of getting comments” on the videos he posted.

Compared with entertainment, political topics “are less likely to get into copyright trouble and are more cost-effective,” he said.

In the beginning, each video he posted gained hundreds to thousands of views.

Wanting to increase the number of subscribers to his channel, he began following the “subject of the hour.”

They included: Ishimaru in the July Tokyo gubernatorial election; Sanae Takaichi in the September Liberal Democratic Party presidential election: and the opposition Democratic Party for the People in the October Lower House election.

The man said that he thought the number of competing channels increased after the Tokyo gubernatorial election. He was even invited to join a “commercial group” that shared the responsibility of finding and editing video materials.

The dozen videos that the man posted on YouTube before and after the Hyogo gubernatorial election were viewed a total of 1.4 million times.

His earnings in November amounted to several hundred thousand yen.

However, he said his goal is not only profits.

The man was born in Yamagata Prefecture, and he said he has always felt himself to be a “political minority.”

He said he had kept voting for LDP candidates because his parents told him that these politicians “have taken care of us.”

He said this automatic way of voting made him think, “My vote is worthless.”

However, YouTube changed his perspective on voting.

One by one, the candidates and parties to which he had posted videos made great strides, and he felt a sense of accomplishment that he had “caused something to happen,” he said. “The sense of being a political minority also faded away.”

YOUTUBE CONNECTION

On June 19, the day before the Tokyo gubernatorial election campaign officially started, a 36-year-old man who lives in Tokyo was asked by a person, “Can you go to Shinbashi today?”

The two had been following each other on X.

The person asked him to attend Ishimaru’s rally in Shinbashi.

From that day, the Tokyo man became a “film crew member” for a YouTube channel with 100,000 subscribers.

He had been unemployed, and his main goal at the time was to earn an income.

His “employer” was a man who lived in eastern Japan who seemed to have no connection with Ishimaru’s campaign office.

The Tokyo man filmed Ishimaru’s speeches with his smartphone and uploaded the videos to a file transfer service. He said 2,000 yen ($13) per video was immediately transferred to his account.

Once a video was uploaded, a script supervisor would give instructions on how to edit it. A video editor would “deliver” the edited version within three hours.

A manual laid out a series of procedures, and even the font, size, and color of the tickers were specified in detail.

The man said he shot about 40 videos until July 6, the day before the election. During the entire process, communication was done through an app, and he never met with any of his “colleagues.”

IMPORTANCE OF THIRD PARTIES

Ichini Inc, a company that operates the go2senkyo.com political information site, was contracted to run online advertising for Ishimaru’s campaign in the Tokyo gubernatorial election.

Suguru Takahata, CEO of the company, noted changes in the way the public gains its information.

According to a survey conducted by the telecommunications ministry’s Institute for Information and Communications Policy, internet viewing surpassed real-time TV viewing after 2020 in terms of weekday usage among the public.

Google Japan in October said it had 73.7 million domestic YouTube users over the age of 18.

“After the COVID-19 pandemic, YouTube is replacing TV and becoming the new ‘internet ground,’” Takahata said.

According to Ichini’s analysis, during the Tokyo gubernatorial election, YouTube-related videos were viewed a total of about 470 million times.

Ishimaru-related videos received about 240 million views, twice as many as the number for Koike.

The influence of the internet is increasing in national elections as well.

Ichini and JX Press Corp. jointly conducted a survey on which media voters relied on for the Oct. 27 Lower House election.

According to the survey results, it was newspapers for those in their 70s and older, TV for those in their 50s and 60s, and the internet, including social networking sites, for those in their 40s and younger.

Among those in their 20s, 53 percent used the internet the most.

Another factor is the diversification of social networking sites.

Facebook and Twitter (now X) began in the 2000s as tools that emphasized community functions to spread information among people who followed each other.

On the other hand, TikTok, which started in 2017, gained popularity with its specification that “buzzed” videos would appear one after another, regardless of whether users are following the video creators.

X and YouTube have also changed to a system that displays recommendations based on search trends and fads.

“The advent of tools that make it easier to get information out to people who do not follow you has made it possible to appeal to unaffiliated voters outside of your base of supporters and uncover new votes,” Takahata said.

The key to the spread of the videos is the contributions by “third parties,” which are neither political parties nor candidates’ camps, Takahata said.

According to Ichini’s analysis, campaign-related videos were viewed a total of 270 million times during the Lower House election. Of them, 33.4 percent were posted by political parties, 7.7 percent by candidates, and 58.9 percent by third parties.

Takahata has long been involved in election campaigns using the internet to promote political participation.

“The power of social networking sites has grown by leaps and bounds, and this, combined with dissatisfaction with established political parties and the mass media, is changing the nature of elections,” he said.

“While interest in politics is growing, there is also a danger that short-sighted judgments will increase.”

(This article was written by Ryota Goto, Yuki Nikaido and Eiichiro Nakamura.)