Legal Japan enacts revised law for swift removal of defamatory online posts

Yesterday, the Japanese parliament passed an updated law to expedite the deletion of defamatory posts on social media platforms, including Facebook and X, with greater openness. The modified law requires social media operators to establish contact points for removal requests and reveal their criteria for post-deletion, among other actions. The law will be implemented within one year. The push for more robust online defamation protections gained momentum following the suicide of Hana Kimura, a professional wrestler and participant in the Netflix series "Terrace House," who took her own life in 2020 due to a flood of online hate messages.

Many defamation victims have been seeking to have such posts promptly deleted before they can spread but have struggled to find a point of contact and say deletion rules are unclear. The law also requires operators to notify people within a specified time frame whether posts will be deleted.

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Paywall alert:

Japan could go as far to block Facebook and King Zuk would care less. I'd love to see how Facebook will deal with this.