Japan's lower house passed a bill on Friday aimed at facilitating the swift removal of defamatory content on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and YouTube with more transparency.
The bill calls for operators to set up points of contact for accepting deletion requests and disclose criteria for removing posts, among other measures. It is expected to be enacted in the current Diet session through June following deliberations in the upper house.
The move toward revising the provider liability limitation law comes as many defamation victims who sought to have such posts removed before they could spread widely struggled to find a point of contact or found the deletion rules to be unclear.
The bill, passed unanimously by the House of Representatives, also requires operators to notify users within a specified time frame whether their posts will be deleted.
