Japanese Twitterverse parroted calls of U.S. election fraud, study finds

Japanese Twitterverse parroted calls of U.S. election fraud, study finds

January 24, 2021

Yomiuri Shimbun file photo

Supporters of then U.S. President Donald Trump march in Washington on Nov. 14, claiming there was fraud in the presidential election.

The Yomiuri ShimbunNearly 70% of Japanese Twitter posts related to the U.S. presidential election contained unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud, a Yomiuri Shimbun study has found.

Of Japanese language posts that trended in November and December last year, a majority echoed rhetoric from the United States of a “rigged” election, a trend that continued even after the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory was confirmed. The data revealed Japan’s susceptibility to the dangers of social media as a megaphone for the spread of false stories.

The study, which was conducted with JX Press Corp., analyzed Japanese language posts that directly addressed the presidential election and had garnered at least 2,000 retweets. The posts were then categorized as containing “false information,” “unsubstantiated information,” or “criticisms/opinions predicated on fraud,” per reports by the U.S. Federal Election Commission and state election agencies.

In the week starting Nov. 4, there were 186 Japanese tweets that trended in response to the initial ballot tallies. Of these posts, 68% questioned the integrity of the election results, accounting for approximately 500,000 retweets. There were 75 posts that suggested the election had been manipulated in Biden’s favor, citing false or unsubstantiated claims of ballot counterfeiting and vote tampering. There were also 52 posts critical of Biden, such as those branding him an “enemy of the world.”

The study found that 13% of posts were influenced by mainstream media reports, while the rest were primarily statements of opinion in support of then President Donald Trump.

Of the 55 posts that trended in the week starting Dec. 4, roughly 80% were found to reflect unsubstantiated information and opinion-based claims of fraud, a trend that may have been influenced mainly by Trump’s continued insistence on a “stolen” election.

■ False stories surge as Biden leads

“In just an hour, 120,000 votes went for Biden — none for Trump.”

“200% turnout. If this isn’t fraud, what is?”

Such posts in Japanese began to proliferate on Twitter on the night of Nov. 4 last year.

In the United States, the vote count was reaching its climax in states where a fierce battle between Trump and Biden was underway. After the media reported Biden’s lead, the number of posts with baseless information soared.

“Counterfeit ballots for Biden have been found.”

“Voting was done under the names of dead people.”

All of these posts were apparently based on messages sent out from the United States by Trump supporters, who claimed election fraud. Such information was confirmed to be false by state election commissions and other entities. However, the false stories also spread quickly in Japan.

Main sources of the false information include unidentified personal accounts. There seems to be a trend in which certain critics are among those who “import” inaccurate information from the United States and spread it in Japanese with their radical comments.

Previous posts by such people show that they are hostile to China and foreign residents in Japan, sympathizing with Trump’s hard-line approach to matters.

By spreading conspiracy theories such as Biden and the media in Japan and the United States are being manipulated, quite a few accounts have seen a surge in followers since around last October.

■ Truth becomes secondary

Why does such information spread?

A research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined 126,000 posts in English on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. When the team looked into the time it took for information to reach 1,500 people, it found that false stories traveled six times faster than true stories.

This trend is seen to be more pronounced for political-related posts.

In 2019, a video was posted showing as if then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had made this remark when answering a question in the Diet: “Raising taxes on the wealthy is a ridiculous policy.” The video had been edited in a distorted way, but it spread among opposition party supporters.

Kazutoshi Sasahara, an associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology who wrote a book on the science of fake news, warned of the risk of relying on social media.

“When we’re flooded with information, we tend to see what we want to believe,” he said. “Whether the information is true becomes secondary.”Speech