Countermeasures against election false and misinformation, local media's SNS posts spread

To what extent have local media's efforts to combat false and misinformation during the election spread on social media?

The Asahi Shimbun's data analysis team (Media Research and Development Center) investigated the posts made by two local newspapers on the official X (formerly Twitter) account during the one month period following the announcement date of the Miyagi prefecture gubernatorial election (votes cast on October 26, 2025) and the Kyoto prefecture gubernatorial election (votes cast and counted on April 5, 2026). Comparing the number of reposts of 421 Kahoku Shimpo and 1059 Kyoto Shimbun articles obtained by User Local's SNS analysis service "Social Insight." Data is current as of the time it was obtained by Social Insights, and the number of reposts includes citations. In addition, some posts that included quotation reposts that mentioned articles in both newspapers were picked up, and GPT-5.4 mini, a generative AI (artificial intelligence), was used to mark local newspapers as positive if they clearly showed positive sentiments, and negative if they were in the opposite position.

Second number of reposts during the period

On October 24, 2015, two days before voting was counted in the Miyagi prefecture gubernatorial election, the Kahoku Shimpo published an article stating that a prefectural assembly member supporting the incumbent governor had been slandered over issues such as ``earth burial.'' The title was ``'Next, you're the one to drop this son of a bitch.'' ``This is a declaration of traitor.'' Some Miyagi prefectural assembly members are victims of slander and slander on SNS,'' and the number of reposts was 1,603 times from the date of the announcement until one month later. This was the second most targeted Kahoku Shimpo post.

Looking at the content that was reposted, there were about twice as many positive comments as negative comments, such as ``I feel that Kahoku Shimpo is serious'' (1,464 reposts) and ``Working to improve the accuracy of information is more grounded and precious than stirring up emotions'' (314 reposts).

While some said, ``The Kahoku Shimpo contributed to stopping the spread of false rumors,'' others questioned its fairness, with one saying, ``It only covered false rumors about the current governor's camp and did not cover rumors about his opponent.''

An article published by the Kyoto Shimbun on April 2, 2016, three days before the counting of votes in the Kyoto prefectural gubernatorial election, stating, ``In the survey of the situation in the Kyoto prefectural gubernatorial election, incorrect information that differs from the content of the article is being circulated'' has been reposted 3,086 times by one month after the announcement. The number of views is approximately 633,000 (as of June 11th). The second highest number of Kyoto Shimbun posts targeted. Furthermore, the number of repost comments is slightly less than twice as positive as negative. ``This kind of communication from newspaper companies is helpful,'' he said.