Along with the digitalization of society including the prevalence of social media, damages caused by online defamation are growing in severity. As a damage protection measure, the judicial procedure for the “Right to Demand Disclosure of Identification Information of the Sender”—a legal provision that permits the disclosure of the names and other details of those who have posted information violating the rights of others—was simplified and expedited in October 2022. How far will it be effective against recurring online defamation damages? This paper examines the effects and challenges of the new system. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of guaranteeing the freedom of expression, a careful decision is required when forcibly revealing the identity of a sender who has posted information on the premise of anonymity, and it will be imperative to ensure a balance between the interests of both ends. Another point of issue is how the mass media should confront what is known as the pollution of the digital media ecosystem caused by an enormous amount of misinformation and disinformation, which can act as a source of defamation. Taking a cue from a rumor research method that the dissemination level of misinformation/disinformation depends on the “importance” and “ambiguity” of the information to the information recipient, the author looked into recent defamation cases in detail and found out that the mass media have room for ingenuity in how to communicate the information and that the mass media’s reporting counter news against false information may curb the spread. Furthermore, with the rapid digitalization of society, the mass media have come to be expected to undertake fact-checking more proactively to verify whether a given information on the internet is the truth or not. This paper discusses how to address the “possibilities” and “risks” of freedom of anonymous expression.

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To examine the characteristics of public opinion on social media and the benefits of analyzing it, we reported the analysis of the 5 million tweets posted in 2020 on then Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in the last month issue of this journal. In that paper, we deduced Twitter users’ attitudes towards Mr. Abe, whether they supported him or not, using the method of sentiment analysis with supervised learning (SL). The analysis found that nearly 80% of the tweets we analyzed were classified as expressing negative attitudes towards Mr. Abe and revealed a large deviation from the Cabinet approval rate found in a public opinion survey. Following these findings, the study to be reported in this issue investigates the characteristics of public opinion on Twitter and the benefits of exploring it, by analyzing in detail the 5 million tweets that were used for the previous issue, employing a topic model analysis that can extract topics from tweet texts. Among multiple methods of topic modeling, we used Gibbs Sampling Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture (GSDMM), a method suitable for short texts. As a result of the analysis, 25 topics were extracted, of which the topics related to COVID-19 accounted for 28%, and the topics related to political allegations/scandals for 24%. Looking at the distribution of sentiments, negative opinions about Mr. Abe constituted the large majority for most of the topics, but for the topics “diplomacy,” “criticism against Mr. Abe and countercriticism of those critics,” and “response to the news of his resignation,” about 20% were positive opinions. While the topics related to political allegations/scandals surged only for a short time and tended to be posted repeatedly by a relatively small number of accounts, the topics related to COVID-19 persisted for more than one month and were mentioned by a relatively large number of accounts. The majority of Twitter users’ attitudes towards Mr. Abe were disapproval of him, but the classification of the tweets into different topics showed a mixture of two types: topics that were enthusiastically posted and retweeted by a relatively small number of accounts, represented by topics related to political allegations/scandals and topics mentioned by a relatively large number of accounts with negative opinions, such as “state of emergency declaration” and “Abenomask”—masks distributed free of charge to all households by the government. The analysis of Twitter data allows us to capture the public opinion on topics on which people have a strong onion and are enthusiastic enough to proactively express their views, unlike opinions measured by conventional questionnaires and responded because “I was asked to.” As this study used a topic analysis and a sentiment analysis, the combination of methods makes it possible to examine the transition of people’s interests and passions, as well as their diversity and the changes occurring depending on the situation. This is presumably one of the benefits of Twitter post analysis. As described above, public opinions that expressed on Twitter are qualitatively different from those grasped by conventional public opinion surveys. It is important to understand the characteristics, advantages, and limitations of opinions perceived in public opinion surveys and those perceived in Twitter analysis, respectively, and use them to complement each other. This will give a more multifaceted understanding of public opinion.

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This is the 15th year of the Trial Project on Academic Use of the NHK Archives—a project that aims to make past broadcast programs produced by NHK available for academic studies. The purpose of this endeavor is to regard past broadcast programs as historical and cultural assets and return their benefits to society in the form of academic use. So far, researchers have marked more than 250 views of programs at the NHK Archives, more than 120 academic papers have been produced, and more than 100 presentations have been made at academic conferences. Nevertheless, while we have seen steady research achievements, the status of the project within NHK is still (trial), and it is also true that there are notable setbacks, such as the limitations on viewable content have been increased since 2016. We can also see a gap between NHK and researchers in how they perceive research findings, or research “achievements.” This paper reports the “presentations of research findings” held in October 2022, discusses the trend of the academic-use trials in recent years, and presents recommendations on what should be done to make the future developments of this project more fruitful. While we leave researchers to identify what constitutes an “achievement,” we also argue that NHK should do what it can do to enhance the value of broadcast programs in academic research.

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