Google has announced several measures to support the upcoming general elections in India. The tech giant is teaming up with the Election Commission of India (ECI) to connect voters to helpful information on Search in English as well as Hindi.
For election-related news and information, YouTube’s recommendation system will prominently surface content from authoritative sources on the YouTube homepage, in search results, and in the “Up Next” panel. During key moments, high-quality content from authoritative news sources will be featured on the Top News and Breaking News shelves, as well as the news watch page.
Additionally, information panels will indicate funding sources from publishers that receive public or government funding and provide context for topics prone to misinformation.
To protect its platforms and combat misinformation, Google is enforcing its policies and using AI models to fight abuse at scale. The company has a dedicated team of local experts across all major Indian languages and AI models to identify and remove content that violates its policies.
Advertisers who wish to run election ads on Google’s platforms are required to undergo an identity verification process, provide a pre-certificate issued by the ECI or anyone authorized by the ECI for each election ad they intend to run where necessary and have in-ad disclosures that clearly show who paid for the advertisement.
Google ad policies currently prohibit the use of manipulated media, such as deepfakes or doctored content, generated by artificial intelligence. To ensure transparency in content creation, Google now labels content created with YouTube’s generative AI features, like Dream Screen. Additionally, YouTube will soon require creators to disclose if they have created realistic altered or synthetic content and display a label indicating this to viewers.
Further, Google is rolling out restrictions on the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses. To provide users with additional context of images found online, there is an “About this Image” section in Search.
Furthermore, the tech giant recently joined the C2PA coalition and standard to help provide more transparency and context for people on AI-generated content.
