What happened with the "new section on Advancing the Human Rights Situation?"

2025-07-25

• Among the PRs of initiative taken by the government in the formulation of a policy or bill (rather than by bureaucrats) to promote good governance, only one PR received over 100 comments at most. of the 10 or so comments at most, only one received more than 100 comments.
• https://github.com/team-mirai/policy/pull/6335
• What's going on, I asked o3.

The following is a report on why PR 6335 "Establishment of a new section on the advancement of the human rights situation" has become a "hot topic" in a short period of time, based on publicly available information. To summarize just the main points: (1) The proposal included a large amount of highly abstract information on "human rights," a topic that involves a high degree of value judgment, and received criticism from both legal and technical experts at the same time. (2) Before the rules for discussion on GitHub were in place, the number of comments from outside parties increased, and the comments snowballed from the first day. --The result was a three-tiered structure. - In short, it is an understanding that this is what happens when a highly abstract discussion is posted in a place that is not supposed to be a discussion forum, and then spread on social networking sites. - (Personally, I think it would have been a good idea to move to PUBLIC ARCHIVE at the end of the Upper House election, which was actually delayed by a few days.) - Team Mirai staff did not participate in this discussion, so calling this an "internal Team Mirai discussion" is misinformation. - If you put something on a bulletin board that anyone can write on, it's like a third-party fight broke out there. - I think any engineer familiar with GitHub knows that "anyone can write on it." - Worse, some users were using Yasuno-san's face icon, which some may have misidentified as him. -  - Note as an example of failure of a large scale deliberation (well, I didn't expect to start a discussion there, so it was just a [web forum](/en/web%20forum) without AI moderators like the ones I had put in during the Tokyo gubernatorial election, so it was vulnerable, I guess).

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Continuation of o3 description

1. the content of PR and the specific fire of the "technology party 1-1 Outline of Proposal

• Through a dialogue between the proposer (Akio Hoshi) and an AI chatbot, he tried to add a new section to the manifesto called "Advancement of the Human Rights Situation"
• Criticisms of "jurisprudential imprecision" and "loss of intellectual property in redefinition" erupted because of the ambiguous connection between human rights and international and domestic law, while positioning human rights as "norms".

1-2 Direct causes of the stormy discussion

• Major Points of Controversy Examples of Typical Comments
• Treatment of enforceability of international human rights law and Article 98 of the Constitution "Japan has not ceded its authority to the UN", etc.
• Engineering users: Implementation should be prioritized over "norms"; language is abstract; "Moving code is as good as police power", etc.
• Philosophy/Humanities Users: The redefinition of the concept of human rights, History of Enlightenment thought "Misunderstanding the flow from Magna Carta," etc.

Thus, July 14 → over 100 comments as of July 24, an unusually long time even for the party's repository!

2. diffusion dynamics - "X influencer cannon 2-1 Diffusion time line

• Around 20:00 on 7/14 | Create PR → Start discussion in GitHub
• 7/15 am | Post by Akio Hoshi (IT x human rights journalist) with link to X
• 7/15 same day | Retweeted by author Taiyo Fujii
• 7/15 evening | Researcher Sayaka Oki described the thread as a "dangerous discussion
• 7/16-17 | also reprinted in Threads and Bluesky
• 7/18-19 | note.com and other outside media critique articles

2-2 Impact

• Hoshi's post received 12,000 likes and over 3,000 reposts (from a report with screenshots), and the number of new visitors to GitHub PR skyrocketed.
• Technical clusters with overlapping social graphs flowed in at once, and the "anyone can write" mechanism made the volume of discussion uncontrollable.
• In the GitHub comment section, the "discuss here instead of X" and "explain in X" groups clashed, and the meta-discussion accelerated.

3. secondary wave: media and critics' arguments

• note The article "Selectivism and Dystopia" makes the debate more visible by mentioning the danger of a controlled society while the proposal calls for "inclusion of the weak.
• The position of "Team Mirai = Tech x Human Rights" was reexamined on YouTube political feeds and blogs, and began to spill over into the party image.

4. summary - three reasons for the expansion of the problem

• Difficulty in setting the theme
  • The cost of shared assumptions is high due to the intersection of jurisprudence, ethics, and implementation.
• Vulnerability of Open Draft Method
  • The operational rules that made GitHub a "plaza" were not yet in place and could not withstand the surge of inbound traffic.
• External pressure through influencer diffusion
  • Tens of thousands of reaches were reached overnight, and participants with varying degrees of understanding, both inside and outside the party, commented simultaneously. As a result, discussions diverged on multiple topics, including "What are human rights?" and "What is the boundary between politics and code?

This case is a typical example of the combination of difficulty of the content itself, social proliferation, and immaturity in process design, which resulted in a short period of time in which the situation could not be resolved.

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