As Election Day approaches in the United States, we are drawing on our existing efforts and providing you with an update on our latest initiatives, tools and protective measures:
Continue to help people find reliable information
As Election Day approaches, we are working to provide citizens with quality, trusted information from nonpartisan organizations. Here are some of the features and partnerships we have working to help citizens find information about candidates, voting processes, and polling places:
- Research:As we’ve done in past elections, we’re rolling out a Search feature that helps people across the United States find reliable information about how they can register to vote. When you search for information about the voter registration process in your state, you’ll soon be able to find resources and aggregated information from state election offices, provided by Democracy works. As always, this feature will be available to all users in the United States.
- YouTube: In the coming weeks, US viewers will be able to access a range of features that will provide them with helpful information about the election. When searching for federal candidates, an information panel may appear above the search results, highlighting candidate details, such as their political party, and a link to Google Search. There may also be a link to the candidate’s official channel. And in the final weeks of the campaign, we will display reminders on the YouTube homepage about where and how to vote.
- Google Play:We recently launched a new badge for applications from official government agencies. This will help direct people to reliable information, especially for voting.
- Gen AI Products: Last DecemberWe announced that we would be restricting election-related query responses on the Gemini app and web experience. As we integrate Gen AI into more customer experiences, we are also implementing election-related restrictions across many of these products, including Search AI Overviews, YouTube AI generated summary for Live Chat, Gems, and image generation in Gemini. Particularly for federal and state elections, our users rely on us to provide reliable and up-to-date information on topics like current candidates, voting processes, and election results. But this new technology can make mistakes as it learns or as news breaks. For many of these queries on Gemini, we are also providing a link that connects users directly to Google Search for the latest and most accurate information.
Monitor and anticipate abuse trends
Our threat intelligence teams continue to monitor influence operations and cyberattacks across our platforms and the broader ecosystem. Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) recently published About APT42, a threat actor supported by the Iranian government, and its targeted phishing campaigns against accounts associated with Israeli military and government officials, as well as individuals associated with the U.S. presidential election. With respect to coordinated influence operations, we are not seeing dramatic changes in tactics from previous election cycles. To the extent we see threat actors using AI, it is generally to increase the speed or scale of their information operations, rather than to deploy new strategies. In response, we are using AI tools to better detect problematic content and combat their efforts.
We also remain vigilant in monitoring and addressing new content or techniques that may violate our long-standing product policies on topics such as manipulated media Or patently false allegations that could undermine confidence in democratic processes (for example, an ad that misleads users about voting dates). We enforce these policies regardless of political affiliation or content.
Strengthen security measures for high-risk users
Understanding the patterns and trends of malicious actors helps inform our approach to keeping all users and their personal information secure, but it’s especially important for high-risk users during election cycles. We continue to develop best-in-class security technology and provide free training and tools to high-risk users, including elected officials, campaign workers, government officials, and journalists:
- Advanced Protection Program: We encourage high-risk users to enroll in Google’s free Advanced Protection Program (APP). newly integrated access keys in the APP to further increase account security.
- Training and security keys: In partnership with non-partisan organizations such as Defend digital campaigns and through Google’s Campaign Security Project, we’ve delivered security training sessions to thousands of local campaign staff from all political parties and poll workers in all 50 states. This year, we’re delivering 100,000 of them. Titan Security Keys to high-risk users.
- Campaign Workspace — Account Security Fundamentals: We encourage Workspace Campaigns customers to sign up for Workspace for Campaigns, a free, one-click feature that lets you immediately configure 26 basic security settings for your entire team. This feature is available to all campaigns eligible for Defending Digital Campaigns support.
- Project Shield: We encourage all websites supporting the election to register Project Shield to increase stability during the election cycle. Project Shield helps protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and legitimate traffic spikes, and provides free protection to websites that host information about political candidates, voting, poll monitoring, and any other website that supports the electoral process.
