Internet & Online Safety - Japan

The Provider Liability Limitation Act was amended in May 2024 and renamed the Information Distribution Platform Act, entering into force in April 2025. It targets 'rights infringement' (defamation, privacy, etc.) by victims rather than imposing a broad duty of care over all online harms, keeping the regime partial rather than comprehensive.

On 30 April 2025 MIC designated Google LLC, LINE Yahoo Corporation, Meta Platforms, TikTok and X Corp. as 'large-scale specified telecommunications service providers' under Article 20(1). Designation thresholds are average monthly active users exceeding 10 million, or average monthly posts exceeding 2 million, over a one-year period.

Designated operators must respond to rights-infringement removal requests faster — making a determination and notifying the requester within roughly seven days — and must establish and publicly disclose their content-moderation/removal standards, with MIC guidelines listing illegal content (CSAM, obscenity, revenge porn, drug sales, fraud schemes) operators should cover.

Liability for user content remains a conditional safe-harbour: under the IDPA (formerly the Provider Liability Limitation Act) providers are shielded from damages where they could not have known content was infringing, and the law also provides a disclosure procedure for identifying anonymous posters.

The 2008 Act on Development of an Internet Environment for Young People requires mobile carriers to provide filtering for under-18 contracts (which guardians may switch off) and only obliges platforms to make 'best efforts' to promote appropriate use by minors — there is no mandatory social-media age-verification mandate currently in force.

As of April 2026, MIC is developing proposals to mandate age verification (jointly with mobile carriers and OS providers) and to auto-activate age-based filtering and risk labelling for minors from the outset of social-media use, but these remain proposals rather than enacted law.