Maggio, 2022

Pictured above: David Miliband, CEO and President of the International Rescue Committee visited the Google office in Berlin today, where he met with United for Ukraine’s founders and Google executives.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a tragedy with a huge human cost. It’s heartbreaking to see all that the people of Ukraine are going through, and it weighs heavily across Europe, particularly for those with family, friends and colleagues in the region.

We’re committed to doing all we can to help. From the beginning of the war, our teams have been working around the clock to support the humanitarian effort, provide trustworthy information and promote cybersecurity.

United for Ukraine — providing critical information for refugees

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has estimated that more than 5 million refugees have already fled Ukraine into neighboring countries, with a further 13 million living in Ukrainian territory and in need of vital aid.

For those leaving Ukraine and settling for now in a new country, finding authoritative information and trusted services can be challenging and time-consuming. To help make it easier, Google.org is providing a $1.5 million grant to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), along with a team of Google.org Fellows, to expand access to critical information for those impacted by the war in Ukraine.

The money and expertise will help the IRC support unitedforukraine.org, an informative website and civil society effort that helps displaced people to find housing, legal aid and psychological support. The platform was launched by United for Ukraine, a non profit organization founded in February 2022 by two Ukrainian friends — Olga Hamama, CEO of venture development platform Planet FC, and Nina Levchuk, who happens to work for Google.

Unitedforukraine.org supports Ukrainian refugees through a network of over 400 legal experts and psychological support professionals from more than 30 countries. It will be part of the IRC’s Signpost Project, a global humanitarian technology program that helps refugees find resources to meet their urgent needs. Google has supported the IRC in its important work since 2015, providing $8 million in grant funding and more than 10,000 hours of pro bono support.

Over the course of six months, a Fellowship team of 13 Google employees will work full time and pro-bono with the IRC to help expand unitedforukraine.org and Signpost globally. The goal is to create a trusted place for displaced people to easily find both urgent support and long-term solutions, though of course we hope they will be able to return to a safe and secure Ukraine very soon.

Supporting frontline humanitarian work

This grant is the latest in our work to support humanitarian aid and refugee support groups in Ukraine and the surrounding countries.

Through Google.org and Googlers, we have already committed over $35 million in funding and in-kind support to aid relief efforts for those affected by the war in Ukraine. Many Googlers in the region are themselves hosting Ukrainian refugees in their homes, helping in local reception centers or at the border.

Tomorrow (5 May 2022), at the Donors Conference in Warsaw, I will announce a further commitment of $10 million in humanitarian support, which includes cash grants and in-kind donations, from Google.org and Google to help people in Ukraine. This will bring our total commitment from Google.org and Googlers to over $45 million in funding and in-kind support.

Helping through our products and tools

In times of war, accurate and timely information can save lives. We have been working to make our tools as helpful as possible to people affected by the war in Ukraine.

In Ukraine, we have worked closely with the government to send rapid air raid alerts to Android mobile phones in endangered areas, and feature information on shelter and aid points in Search and Maps.

We’re also working to protect those in the region against cyber attacks — increasing online protections for everyone, while Project Shield, our free protection against DDoS attacks, is already defending over 200 Ukrainian news, government and humanitarian organization websites. On top of this, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been closely monitoring cybersecurity activity in Eastern Europe, providing regular updates and sharing information to help others detect and respond to activity.

Globally, Google is elevating trusted news sources in response to searches about the war — and shutting down harmful content and misinformation. Since the war started, YouTube has removed more than 8,000 channels and 60,000 videos for misinformation, hate speech or graphic violence related to the war in Ukraine.

Throughout, we’ve worked to ensure that our efforts provide meaningful support to the people and businesses affected by the war – and we intend to keep focused on that goal, whatever the future may hold.

User safety is at the top of our list when we make decisions about ads and monetized content on our platforms. In fact, thousands of Googlers work around the clock to prevent malicious use of our advertising services and help make them safer for people, businesses and publishers. We do this important work because an ad-supported internet means everyone can access essential information.

And as the digital world evolves, our policy development and enforcement strategies evolve with it — helping to prevent abuse while allowing businesses to reach new customers and grow. We’ve continued to invest in our policies, teams of experts and enforcement technology to stay ahead of potential threats. In 2021, we introduced a multi-strike system for repeat policy violations. We added or updated over 30 policies for advertisers and publishers including a policy prohibiting claims that promote climate change denial and a certification for U.S.-based health insurance providers to only allow ads from government exchanges, first-party providers and licensed third-party brokers.

In 2021, we removed over 3.4 billion ads, restricted over 5.7 billion ads and suspended over 5.6 million advertiser accounts. We also blocked or restricted ads from serving on 1.7 billion publisher pages, and took broader site-level enforcement action on approximately 63,000 publisher sites.

Check out the entire 2021 Ads Safety Report for enforcement data, and read on for a few of the highlights.

Responding to the war in Ukraine

Though the report only covers 2021, we also wanted to share an update on our response to the war in Ukraine — given it’s top of mind for so many around the world, including our enforcement teams. We acted quickly to institute a sensitive event, prohibiting ads from profiting from or exploiting the situation. This is in addition to our longstanding policies prohibiting content that incites violence or denies the occurrence of tragic events to run as ads or monetize using our services.

We’ve also taken several other steps to pause the majority of our commercial activities in Russia across our products — including pausing ads from showing in Russia and ads from Russian-based advertisers, and pausing monetization of Russian state-funded media across our platforms.

So far, we’ve blocked over eight million ads related to the war in Ukraine under our sensitive event policy and separately removed ads from more than 60 state-funded media sites across our platforms.

Suspending triple the number of advertiser accounts

As we shared in our 2020 report, we’ve seen an increase in fraudulent activity during the pandemic. In 2021, we continued to see bad actors operate with more sophistication and at a greater scale, using a variety of tactics to evade our detection. This included creating thousands of accounts simultaneously and using techniques like cloaking and text manipulation to show our reviewers and systems different ad content than they’d show a user — making that content more difficult to detect and enforce against.

We’re continuing to take a multi-pronged approach to combat this behavior, like verifying advertisers’ identities and identifying coordinated activity between accounts using signals in our network. We are actively verifying advertisers in over 180 countries. And if an advertiser fails to complete our verification program when prompted, the account is automatically suspended.

This combination of efforts has allowed us to match the scale of our adversaries and more efficiently remove multiple accounts associated with a single bad actor at once. As a result, between 2020 and 2021, we tripled the number of account-level suspensions for advertisers.

Preventing unreliable claims from monetizing and serving in ads

In 2021, we doubled down on our enforcement of unreliable content. We blocked ads from running on more than 500,000 pages that violated our policies against harmful health claims related to COVID-19 and demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust and participation in elections. Late last year, we also launched a new Unreliable Claims policy on climate change, which prohibits content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around its existence and causes.

We’ve stayed focused on preventing abuse in ads related to COVID-19, which was especially important in 2021 for claims related to vaccines, testing and price-gouging for critical supplies like masks. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve blocked over 106 million ads related to COVID-19. And we supported local NGOs and governments with $250 million in Ad Grants to help connect people to accurate vaccine information.

Introducing new brand safety tools and resources for advertisers and publishers

Maintaining advertiser brand safety remains a top priority. Last year, we added a new feature to our advertiser controls that allows brands to upload dynamic exclusion lists that can be automatically updated and maintained by trusted third parties. This helps advertisers get access to the resources and expertise of trusted organizations to better protect their brands and strengthen their campaigns.

We know that advertisers care about all the content on a page where their ads may run, including user-generated content (UGC) like comment sections. That’s why we hold publishers responsible for moderating these features. We’ve released several resources in the past year to help them do that — including an infographic and blog post, troubleshooters to solve UGC issues and a video tutorial.

In addition to these resources, we made targeted improvements to the publisher approval process that helped us better detect and block bad actors before they could even create accounts. As a result, we reduced the number of sites that needed site-level action compared to previous years.

Looking ahead to 2022

A trustworthy advertising experience is critical to getting helpful and useful information to people around the world. And this year, we’ll continue to address areas of abuse across our platforms and network to protect users and help credible advertisers and publishers. Providing more transparency and control over the ads people see is a big part of that goal. Our new “About this ad” feature is rolling out globally to help people understand why an ad was shown and which advertiser ran it. They can also report an ad if they believe it violates one of our policies or block an ad they aren’t interested in.

We believe this combination of work will help to create a safer experience for users everywhere. You can find ongoing updates to our policies and controls in our Help Center.

Matt Cooke, who heads up the Google News Lab, talks about how his team’s keeping it real in news and search.

First, can you tell us about the Google News Initiative and the work that your team does?

The Google News Initiative is the part of Google that works with journalists and entrepreneurs to drive innovation in news — from surfacing factual information to helping local publishers to digitize their content.

As part of that, the News Lab offers partnerships and training in 70 countries around the world to bring Google technology to journalists and news publishers. We want to help strengthen digital skills to help journalists verify sources, fact check and explore different forms of storytelling for audiences searching for accurate information.

Tell us about your background and what led to working at Google.

I worked for a number of years at BBC in various roles, including reporting from the East London multimedia newsroom in the build-up to the 2012 Olympic Games. We gave members of the audience access to small cameras, which got me thinking about the potential of digital storytelling. So when the opportunity came along at Google, I seized it! I’m coming up to my 10th anniversary here.

What tips can you give readers searching for credible news and information?

News comes to us in so many different ways and formats these days so it can sometimes be hard to tell what’s authoritative and accurate. But there are tools available to help, and there are five things I would recommend when it comes to checking authenticity:

1. If you’ve stumbled across something surprising, check the source. The About This Result feature provides details about a website before you visit it, including its description, when it was first indexed and whether your connection to the site is secure.
2. If an image looks suspicious you can go toGoogle Images and do a reverse image search by clicking on the camera icon and dragging in your picture. An example of an obvious fake, that many will have seen and that recurs, is the shark swimming up a flooded street.
3. Again if a story is surprising, look at other news sources to see if they’re covering it too. If they’re not, that could give you some pause for thought. Stories on Google news have the option for ‘full coverage,’ which means you can see how others are reporting the same story.
4. We have something called theFact Check Explorer which allows you to type in a search term and then it shows you counterclaims and debunks of that theory by fact checking organisations.
5. Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View can all help you verify whether an image that you are seeing is from the reported location. This can be done by checking for shadows of, for example, mountains or nearby buildings on Street View, and by matching them up with Google Earth.

There are some amazing and painstaking examples of work from BBC Africa Eye with video verification. It shows that by combining digital tools with great journalism, you can get to the heart of what’s really going on.

How are you tackling deep fakes?

Technology evolves fast, but our engineering teams and trust and safety teams are working hard to make sure that our technology stays ahead of emerging threats, and we’re working closely with industry partners too to understand how they’re engaging with verification and misinformation. It’s an industry-wide effort.

Progress is being made, for example YouTube has something calledContent ID which allows organisations to detect their IP copyright and content.

How does Google make sure that organisations don’t game the algorithm?

We update the search algorithm thousands of times a year and work hard to make sure that the information people find is the most accurate, authoritative and relevant to what they’re looking for. We have policies in place to prevent spam and any deceptive practices — there’s more information here about how Search works. And I’d also add that we place a lot of importance on people finding good quality local news from reliable sources as well.

How do you make sure that search literacy isn’t confined to the few and privileged?

Over the last few years we’ve spent a lot of time with media literacy experts to provide newsroom style lessons for primary and secondary school students across the UK, a good example is Be Internet Legends which has reached over 70% of primary schools in England.

And there’s more that can be done outside the classroom. Last year, we contributed €25 million to the European Media and Information Fund, which supports funding for publishers, academics and researchers to research and implement media literacy.

What excites you about Search?

One of the things that my team works with is a tool calledGoogle Trends, which shows you anonymised, indexed data on what people are searching for across a given location or a given time.

We collaborate with broadcasters, journalists, academics and non-profits to see what emerging patterns and trends in search reveal. What’s really interesting is how changing questions reveal changing attitudes across time. It’s useful for journalists, or indeed anybody who’s interested, to see what preoccupations people have around major news events.

For example, if you’re looking for the latest design trends, we can see that Search interest for ‘japandi interior design’ has increased by 973% in the last 12 months. Similarly, if you’re wondering what people in the UK are reading, we can share that between 2017 and 2021, Search interest for books on neurodiversity has increased by 1280%.

What’s your most loved search feature that everybody should know about?

Some of the more Advanced Search features can really save time. So if you’re searching for information about an institution or a public figure, often you’ll have to wade through lots of information. If you want to delve deeper you can start to remove repetitive information, simply by putting a minus symbol in front of a word. For example, I travel a lot for work so if you’re looking for information about UK airports but you don’t want to focus on Heathrow you can type in ‘UK airports -Heathrow.’ It is simple, but saves lots of time!

On Google Street View, my favourite desktop tool is the little clock at the top of the screen. This allows you to go back in time so you can see how things have changed. For example, when Britain was getting ready to host the 2012 Olympic Games, you can see all the flags and banners up in central London. And where cities change fast, for example East London, you can see how new developments have taken the place of old buildings. Take a look!