Ikuya Murata

In the Hyogo Prefecture gubernatorial election held on November 17, 2024, a former governor, who had previously lost his post due to a no-confidence motion passed by the assembly, was re-elected. However, the use of SNS in his election campaign caused controversy,as he was charged with violating the Public Offices Election Law. This paper discusses what made SNS use in this election campaign such big problems from the viewpoints of information ethics and media theory. First, from the viewpoint of information ethics, the issues of information receivers, diffusers, and senders are considered. Second,from the viewpoint of media theory, it is shown that the change of information sources in the election, which caused these problems, can be explained as the restoration of rumor without the binary view of the Internet and mass media.

In order to explore the qualitative and quantitative changes in children’s social networks, we created survey items based on Dunbar’s number, which is the number of people a person is likely to maintain relationships with. After conducting a preliminary survey of high school and university students, we administered a questionnaire survey consisting of 15 questions regarding intimacy in social networks, specifically targeting elementary to high school students. It was conducted in February and March 2021 and 1,163 elementary school children, 1,174 middle school students, and 410 high school students were surveyed. When we factor-analyzed the results, we extracted 13 items from two factors, the task of naming the first factor “relationship at the level of acquaintance” and the second factor “relationship with a sense of trust.” Furthermore, when we performed a chi-square test and residual analysis for each question based on school type, we found that for all items of the first factor, the approximate Dunbar’s number increased from 15 to 150 as the school type progressed from elementary to high school. In addition, the approximate Dunbar’s number for the second factor was around 15, with some items showing an increase and others a decrease.