Japan’s young voters face surge of AI disinformation ahead of general election

TOKYO — Japanese political parties are ramping up efforts to reach young voters ahead of the Feb. 7 general election, even as concerns mount over the spread of AI-generated misinformation.

A recent workshop in Tokyo gathered high school students to improve their fact-checking skills. Participants analyzed real-world examples, including an AI-generated image of a political candidate that contained subtle flaws often missed by the public.

According to a survey by LY Corp., 87% of young people reported encountering misinformation online. In response, the Japanese government has called on social media platforms to accelerate the removal of harmful content.

Japan lowered its voting age from 20 to 18 in 2016, yet voter turnout in this demographic continues to lag behind older age groups. Experts warn that digital media education has failed to keep pace with rapid technological shifts.

The recent proliferation of AI-generated misinformation in Tokyo serves as more than a local anomaly; it is a microcosm of a global crisis: the systematic erosion of information integrity in the age of generative AI. The incident involving a fabricated image at Shinjuku Station demonstrates that deepfakes do not require technical perfection to be effective. They merely need to be "good enough" to deceive a casual user during a high-speed social media scroll.

This technological vulnerability intersects dangerously with existing demographic trends, specifically low voter turnout among younger populations. The ultimate objective of these disinformation campaigns is often not to sway a vote toward a specific candidate, but to manufacture political cynicism. By deepening distrust in institutional narratives, these campaigns suppress voter motivation and hollow out democratic participation from within.

While the Japanese government’s demand for tech platforms to heighten surveillance is a common regulatory reflex, it remains fundamentally flawed. Such mandates outsource the burden of political content moderation to private entities—a role for which they are ill-equipped and which frequently triggers allegations of inconsistent enforcement or censorship. As executives at LY Corp. have suggested, the core of the issue is an educational deficit rather than a purely technical one. The front line in the war against disinformation is not algorithmic filtering, but the cultivation of critical thinking skills, empowering the next generation to navigate an increasingly fractured and complex information ecosystem.

The challenges facing young voters in Japan closely mirror the experiences of the Vietnamese-American community today. For a generation raised between the cultural anchors of Little Saigon and the fast-paced English-language digital world, navigating dual media streams requires a high level of vigilance. Whether they are discussing policy in phở restaurants or managing the logistics of the nail salon industry, young Vietnamese-Americans are frequently caught in the crosshairs of sophisticated misinformation and targeted influence campaigns. As they bridge the gap between their parents’ experiences with F2B visas and their own aspirations for H-1B or EB-5 opportunities, the burden of fact-checking falls squarely on their shoulders. Mastering this media landscape is essential to protecting the community from the refined disinformation that often thrives within diaspora circles.