Many scholars and journalists point out the possibility that the Internet expands the divide in public opinion and in our society by causing polarization of people's opinions about political issues, because selective exposure to news and civic information is more likely to occur on the Internet than in the mass-media-centered environment that was the norm in the past. In this study, turning attention to cyber-racism such as “Alt-Right” in the U.S. or “Netto-uyoku” in Japan, we examined the relations between polarization of xenophobic attitudes and frequencies of exposure to online news via using PCs/smartphones, based on the data from online questionnaire surveys conducted in the U.S. and Japan in 2016. The results of quantile regression analyses showed that in Japan exposure to online news via PCs extended significantly the polarization of users' attitudes, whereas in the U.S. it shifted the attitudes uniformly toward an anti-xenophobic direction. These findings suggest that the occurrence of opinion polarization on the Internet is influenced by social, political and cultural contexts.

Because they can reveal the potential needs of users (customer), studies of silent customer analysis or silent majority analysis have increased recently. On the other hand, the user became able to post easily their preferences to the internet following the growth of the internet or SNS. This study proposes to uncover consumers' interests by user situation analysis using “boring” tweets.

We collected about 800,000 “boring” tweets between September 2015 and August 2016 using an independently developed script. Then, we calculated T values and MI values of these tweets, and extracted the parts of speech that co-occurred with the word “boring” (“hima”). Then, we revealed characteristics of the area where the “boring " tweets are concentrated by visualizing the location information of nouns which co-occurred with “boring” on a Japanese map. Furthermore, we revealed the user situation for example in what case does the user say “boring"? by analyzing deeply the nouns that co-occurred with the word “boring”.

In this paper, I examined the legal protection of privacy and obtained the following findings. First, the distribution of personal information based on trust relationships is one of the aspects of privacy, and it should be protected by fiduciary duties. Second, in the judicial precedent in Japan that protected the " reasonable expectation for proper management " of Extensive Privacy Information, the Supreme Court regarded a trust relationship as a privacy interest, and it can be analogized with the fiduciary doctrine under the Anglo-American law. Third, since the protection of " reasonable expectation " stems from the duty of good faith, it can be developed beyond the confidentiality obligation towards the disclosure obligation of business operators as information fiduciaries.

The European Commission is strengthening tackling illegal contents by online-platforms and one of these remedies, which encourages self-detection, might change the framework of notice-and-action procedures. The said remedy is provided in the non-binding guidelines but it is shown by using game theoretic analysis that the threats that the European Commission committed to propose a binding legislative measure, if necessary, would make online-platforms take action voluntarily. In addition, regarding harmful fake news (disinformation), it is mentioned that the European Commission is taking a similar approach.