The purpose of this study is to clarify how the discourse that youth believe in fake news has spread in newspaper. Since the US presidential election in 2016, two local Okinawan newspapers have pointed out that youth believe in fake news, but there were no article pointing out that the elderly people believed in false rumor.

This analysis is conducted as follows. Extracting relevant articles that youth believe in false rumor and fake news from the database of past articles in national and local newspaper. Checking the content of the article and follow the spread of the newspaper discourse.

As a result, comments by un-experts in the media-study were repeatedly reported. Furthermore, it took a year and seven months from the time un-experts made the statement to the time the newspaper corroborated it.

There was little evidence that Okinawan youth believed in fake news. However, continued coverage by the newspaper in a “hearsay” state was regarded as “true.”

Also, after two local newspapers in Okinawa began pointing out that youth in Okinawa believed in false rumor, newspapers other than the two local newspapers had begun dealing with similar articles.

It is not appropriate to generalize this study because the number of articles covered is small. However, it is significant that this study clarified how comments from un-experts in the media-study spread through the mass media without reliable evidence.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, fact-checking has become a vital element in journalism across the globe. However, there is a concern over potential partisan bias in fact-checking. Its failure to reach the extensive audience is also seen as a challenge that needs to be addressed. In Japan, fact-checking is encouraged by the government as a measure against the so-called fake news. However, there is not enough discussion about how to conduct more effective fact-checking. This study reveals what needs to be improved in fact-checking by qualitatively analyzing social media responses to fact-checks conducted by local newspapers during the 2018 Okinawa gubernatorial election. I found that some of the fact-checking messages induced partisan reactions and were used by members of political parties to attack the opponent. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of Twitter posts sharing fact-checking articles and responses to tweets including fake content revealed a partisan division in the Twitter sphere. Fact-checks that induced partisan responses were not conducted based on international standards, while a distinction between fact-checking and verification was ambiguous. The role of journalism in the domain of fact-checking is to offer factual information for the electorate to help them make appropriate decisions. I argue that there needs to be 1) a clearer distinction between the use of the terms “fact-checking” and “verification,” 2) an increased transparency in the process of fact-checking, and 3) a framework that allows the audience to evaluate the fairness of fact-checking.

“Fake News” has become a daily phenomenon in the global media landscape especially since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. As concerns have grown over harmful content online, media literacy programs also need to be re-evaluated and updated in order to better address information disorder in the current media landscape. This paper provides a review of global discourse and literature on the “fake news” phenomenon and media literacy as well as emerging media literacy programs overseas. It also examines the existing curriculum and challenges in media literacy education in Japan. In a global discourse experts and academics have largely come to an agreement that the use of the term “fake news” should be avoided in discussing countermeasures since the term has been highly politicized and misused. Alternative terms are now used to describe different types of harmful online content in order to understand the complex information ecosystem. However, in Japan, the much-hyped term is still widely used arbitrarily to refer to divergent types of content. Furthermore, the most popular approach in media literacy programs in Japan has been based on decoding messages created and shared by the mainstream media outlets. In an increasingly polarized society in which trust in journalism is declining, the conventional approach could further exacerbate distrust in the media and institutions. This practice could potentially have the adverse effect of encouraging people to believe biased information that only strengthens their personal beliefs. With that in mind, I argue that we need to revamp media literacy programs to better suit the age of “fake news” by considering the media environment and social backgrounds particular to Japan.

The issue of fake news is influenced by various information technologies in the modern era, and there are aspects that shake the premise of the concept of a “marketplace of ideas”. The harm caused from the viewpoint of this paper by “fake news (disinformation)” is, first, the impact on the “elections”, second, the impact on the speech space that basis our democratic political system, and third, the impact on human rights. The solutions to these problems include content regulation against speakers of disinformation and online platforms. However, it should be noted that these may destroy the marketplace of ideas, rather than solve the problem.

Instead, the paper discusses of “Campaign silence” regulations in election campaigns, subsidies to existing media outlets, and approaches to privacy and personal data protection (e.g. GDPR).

Most of the TEPCO employees keeps unfulfilling at work since the company caused Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, with significantly higher turnover rates just after the accident.

This paper shows that quantitative analysis of psychological impacts of those coverage on those pride being as the employee of the targeted company, and that those impacts will not easily decrease, based on the results of the questionnaire survey tracking the multi-year trend from 2002 on and accumulative amount of newspaper coverage. The result indicates that not only short-term (within a year) but also long-term (for 6 years or longer) coverage impacts adversely on those pride, the degree of which is predictable quantitatively in high precision.

This paper also indicates that the prediction error could be explained by the situation that those pride could be recovered by providing employees with corporate management vision or opportunities of customer service sophistication. These indication could be applicable to other public utilities, or to the companies highly conscious of social contribution.

Personal information needs to be carefully managed and handled in an organization. Rules in an organization and laws for protecting personal information have been developed. In addition, many organizations provide employees with education and training on personal information protection. A focus on such protection is increasing in organizations. However, incidents such as information leakage and loss are still occurring. Therefore, our aim was to develop a personal information protection behavior model of employees working in an organization. We conducted a questionnaire survey on 600 employees. This questionnaire was analyzed using exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and covariance structure analysis. As a result, we developed a personal information protection behavior model in which knowledge affects attitudes, attitudes influence skills, and leads to personal information protection behavior. On the basis of this result, we propose how to promote personal information protection for employees.

Due to the widespread popularity of smartphones and social media to people specially to youths, the risk and danger in people’s life is increasing. This research focused on ‘prostitution’ which has become a serious social pathology problem in recent years, analyzed the use of hashtags attached to problematic postings on Twitter using quantitative text analysis as one factor contributing to the issue. From the results, it was possible to classify seven groups with hashtags of high frequency appearance. Among them, it became clear that the co-occurrence relation between “area names” and “prostitution (indirect expression)” is especially strong. Such findings can be expected to lead to effective preliminary detection in cyber patrol.

Using data from the 5th Questionnaire on Unease in Social Life (Survey on Unease toward Crime) conducted by the Nikkoso Research Foundation for Safe Society in 2014, this paper investigated the effect of internet news exposure on fear of crime. While previous studies have examined the effects of exposure to mass media such as newspapers, television, and radio on fear of crime, it is unclear whether exposure to online news affects fear of crime. With the rapid diffusion of smartphones and other mobile internet devices, the opportunity to read online news has increased. Therefore, it is important to empirically examine the impact of internet news exposure on fear of crime. Results of multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the frequency of internet news exposure had a positive effect on fear of crimes against both respondents and their family members. However, additional analyses by age group showed that the frequency of internet news exposure had a positive effect on fear of crime against respondents only in the 20-39 age group. On the other hand, the frequency of television news exposure had a positive effect on fear of crimes against both respondents and their family members only in the 40-59 age group. For seniors over 60 years old, newspaper, television, and internet news exposures had no significant effect on fear of crime against respondents.

This paper aims to illustrate and show viewpoints for strength of correlation relationships between international personal exchanges and economic activities from the viewpoint of social networks, focusing on person in specialty occupation and international transactions between Japan and 30th countries for 11 years. Moreover, we will conduct this research to analyze effects of geographical distance and cultural distance to discuss distance effect in international transactions additionally, based on the concept of trade barrier not only result in geographical separation between countries or regions but also cultural divergence. With the economic development in emerging countries and the development of international transportation network and information communication environment, cross-border transactions and exchanges in services and the movement of persons are increasing as well as international transactions in goods. And from the point of uncertainty in trading dealing with the remote firms and personals of different business practices and cultures, international personal exchanges assume more importance in advancing the economic transactions in goods and services. This quantitative survey mainly discusses the relationship with international personal exchanges and economic activities based on previous researches in network theory, in consideration of distance effect caused by geographical distance and cultural distance additionally. And results of this empirical analysis suggest that personal exchanges are positively correlated with trading in goods and services in international economic activities.

Deepfake is a technology that replaces a face within a movie with the other's portrait that was extracted and synthesized from pictures or motion pictures including it. A trouble is caused on the actor, actress and other celebrities whose face is appearing on the fake movie in most cases. To claim a injunction of ceasing publication of the fake movie, the neighboring right, that is a property right, is no more effective because neural network does never keep traits of the performance in the course of reconstructing their faces, while it was well effective before rise of the deepfake technology since the performance on a movie had to be directly copied onto fake movies then. According to former judicial precedent with altered photograph, as far as the quality of alternation is so fine that people can take it as a reality, the personal right of portrait is the most likely effective instead, and the property right of publicity would be far less effective because most fake videos are not used for commercial item or advertisement. Nevertheless, Japanese jurisprudence explain the personal right shall be exercised directly by the holder and that makes entertainment office, which takes care of chores concerning the actors and actresses in Japan including resolve of legal trouble, difficult to handle the cases on behalf of them. In this situation that development of new technology caused legal inconveniences for industries, new law or new interpretation of law should be needed to solve the problem.

We focused on Twitter, which is expected to become an increasingly influential tool of political communication, and sought to validate public opinion formation process theories such as the concentration of opinions and announcement effects. We analyzed tweets about the Osaka Metropolis Plan, which was the subject of a referendum in May 2015. We classified tweets and accounts based on support for or opposition to the plan, using a natural language process and latent Dirichlet allocation, and by comparison with newspaper articles. We analyzed changes in the number of posts and active accounts based on the results. We could not find that majority recognition had an impact on Twitter posts. However we investigated retweet networks using social network analysis, and found that support and opposition were clearly divided in a network structure. Moreover, we found several accounts with extremely high degree centrality and betweenness centrality, thereby indicating possible validation of an opinion leader effect and the announcement effect.

The purpose of this study is to examine what factors motivate Twitter users to use a protected account and how these factors relate to self-disclose on their profile pages. Based on the interviews with 14 undergraduates using Twitter, we developed a questionnaire measuring motivations to use privacy settings on Twitter. We then conducted a survey on 153 undergraduates to report their Twitter usage and personal information disclosed online. Exploratory factor analysis identified three motivational factors to use privacy settings on Twitter: the boundary control for self-disclosure, the avoidance of troubles, and social influence. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to predict which motivational factors prevent or promote users to put personal information on their profile accessible in public. The boundary control motivation was negatively related to the disclosure of real names in public. In contrast, the social influence motivation was positively related to the disclosure of private information, such as facial photos on the public profile. Lower graders and females were also likely to disclose in public than higher graders and males, respectively. The current study implies that motivational factors other than privacy concerns lead people to protect or disclose themselves on social networking services.

The purpose of this study is to analyze time spent using SNS per week for university students, to clarify the substitute and complementary relationships among LINE/Twitter/Instagram/YouTube use, and to elucidate the effects of SNS use on academic performance. Data on LINE/Twitter/ Instagram/YouTube use time was collected from students' smartphone battery usage record (N=153), not by a self-reported survey. This study defined academic performance as a final exam score in a course, not a self-declared GPA adopted by many previous studies.

Results suggest that LINE and Instagram, and Twitter and YouTube have complementary relationships. Time spent using LINE, Twitter, and YouTube had a negative impact on academic performance, which means the more students use LINE / Twitter / YouTube, the worse academic performance they showed. These results are consistent with previous findings that suggest SNS use distracts attention, and reduces learning time, resulting in lower academic performance.

Anytime, anywhere, we are able to connect to the Internet and watch visual content, so people's viewing habits are changing. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that citizens have the opportunity to watch the content regardless of the type of media such as broadcasting or online distribution.

In the UK, in order to secure diverse high-quality content, the Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) are obligated to comply with “an independent production quota” rule (“the quota” rule). Since 2007, PSBs (e.g. BBC, ITV) have been pioneering the OTT services such as “simulcast distribution” and “catch-up services” of television programmes, including independent productions. Naturally, early on, in the UK, a legal framework was established on the exploitation of online distribution rights of independent productions.

Thus, in this paper, we will examine this example from the UK, starting from “when, not where” on the exploitation of online distribution rights of independent productions. To begin with, we will survey the three major elements of “the quota” rule: “the quantitative goals (25% rule)”, “the definition of an independent producer” and “the basis for rights exploitation”. Then, we will examine the process of “negotiations for the conclusion of binding agreements” through co-regulation regarding rights exploitation for online distribution of independent productions.