The Effects of Autocratic Propaganda Threats and Awareness of ``Perception Hacking'' Intention: Experimental Evidence from Japan (Study 2)

In recent days, there is an increasing concern that autocratic propaganda spreading through social media undermining democratic governance (e.g., Wolf et al.2024). In this study, we conduct a survey experiment to explore how the awareness of such propaganda may influence public attitudes in Japan. Japan is often not thought of as a major target of autocratic propaganda, but in recent years, there are suggestions that it is vulnerable to information manipulation by its autocratic neighbors, China and Russia (Kalashnikova & Schäfer 2024, Kobayashi et al. 2025). We examine the effect of two information treatments. First, we test whether the information about the threat of Chinese/Russian propaganda increases the support for social media regulation and affective polarization. Second, we also examine whether the exposure to additional information about their deeper intention of “perception hacking”, i.e., influences people’s world views in ways to decrease social trust, increase social divisions, and obstruct the democratic process (Myre 2020), weakens the propaganda threat’s effect to increase the hostility towards foreigners. In Study 2, unlike Study 1, we additionally manipulate whether the actor identifying the intent of “perception hacking” is a conservative or a liberal media outlet, thereby examining the effect of source credibility when there is an “overtly partisan agents who speak out against their apparent political interests” (Berinsky 2023, Ch.4).