Navigating Digital Waters: GOOGLE's Battle Against Election Scam Ads

During a time in which the trajectories between digital information and misinformation have blurred, the integrity of online spaces matters – especially in the election season. One of the foremost battlegrounds of this new age of disinformation for democracy and truth is a name we all know: GOOGLE. New research published by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) details GOOGLE’s intention to prohibit new scam ads due to elections, demonstrating a momentous shift in the integrity of the digital landscape. This article examines these findings, outlining the intricacies and complications of maintaining digital disclosures in seasons of elections.

GOOGLE's Vigilance Against Misinformation

The Fight Against Scam Ads

During the fraught 2020 and 2022 election cycles, GOOGLE searchers were bombarded with scam ads, false voter-registration fees, sites harvesting their personal data and more. Such fake ads threaten democratic processes. But as new research from the Tech Transparency Project shows, the political winds are changing. This October, researchers from the watchdog group TTP searched the same voting-related keywords on GOOGLE that they’d used during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.

A Cleaner Digital Ecosystem

Phrases among the 25 search terms used, like ‘how to vote’, ‘how to register to vote’, ‘early voting’ and ‘when is voting’, led users in 2024 into the same hall of mirrors of misinformation and tricks that they had encountered two years earlier. What TTP found in 2024 were two starkly different realities. Using a ‘clean’ version of the GOOGLE Chrome browser, and a virtual private network to simulate the search from dozens of locations, they tested exactly the same 198 ads that they’d examined in 2022. What they discovered was this: the scam ads were gone. In their place were ads for legitimate voter education sites and organisations.

GOOGLE's Role and Responsibility

These results highlighted what’s at stake when it comes to GOOGLE’s policing of the digital reality it helps to create. In one of its early reports on scam ads, TTP said that the lack of such ads in its research ‘suggests that GOOGLE has the ability to take substantial action to enforce its own advertising policies’. When I contacted GOOGLE about its approach to policing, the company renewed its stated commitment to protecting users from scams and misinformation about voting. Michael Aciman, a GOOGLE spokesman, told me: ‘We don’t allow content that misleads people about voting or their civic participation, and we vigorously enforce against the kind of deceptive ads’ that TTP associated with police impersonation scams.

The Importance of Digital Vigilance

Building a Safer Online Environment

As GOOGLE sees it, taking these actions is the right thing to do. It also demonstrates the company’s determination to take responsibility for creating a safe, secure digital environment where cheap grifts can’t proliferate. Every day, millions of people use GOOGLE for their searches. During elections, when misinformation could have profound real-world consequences, what people find on GOOGLE matters.

The Role of Tech in Democracy

Such efforts also point to the broader role today that technology companies can play in facilitating the democratic process. By specifically removing barriers to accurate information, GOOGLE and other top tech giants are helping to create a more informed electorate – one that feels engaged, empowered and more fully enabled to participate in the democratic process, thus fortifying the basic structure of democracy with a more informed and connected citizenry.

Challenges Ahead

But the progress, while encouraging, is not complete: achieving an entirely scam-free digital environment is still a work in progress. TTP’s findings point to the possibilities for what can be done when companies lead with technology-enabled roles against disinformation. However, as technologies continue to evolve, so will the methods of those who would abuse them, and as a result GOOGLE, among other technology companies, will need to remain on guard, iterating policies and enforcement in a continuous race to stay ahead.

Looking Forward: A Digital Democracy

But it also signals that, as we head into the future, the platforms such as GOOGLE that are so necessary to the health of the digital ecosystem will continue to be allies in these efforts to make our digital realities as free and open as possible. While the work to clean up the electoral advertising space has been difficult, it has also shown what can be accomplished when there’s a will to have our digital world serve and enhance us, rather than undermine us.

Understanding GOOGLE's Impact

The company occupies an outsized position at the heart of this activity. It’s a superconductor of digital attention. As well as its search engine, GOOGLE offers news, e-mail, productivity software, cloud storage, digital advertising, mobile maps, robots, smartphones and self-driving cars. These activities are tightly bound to the online activities of most people today.

GOOGLE taking extra steps to quash scam ads for elections shows that it can use its vast resources for good. By making eliminating misinformation and scam ads primary goals, GOOGLE shows the type of role that technology can play in democracy. It’s a commitment, but it’s also an ongoing process. New challenges will always emerge and make the effort harder. But with every scam ad removed, GOOGLE makes it a little easier for more people to become better-informed, more civically engaged and thus more empowered citizens.

As long as the internet exists, the battle for information integrity will continue. At least in the arena of election scam ads, GOOGLE’s recent progress provides a vision of what’s possible. And as we continue to navigate the information frontier, the company’s actions are also a reminder of just how much technology can do to help democracy – one scamless search at a time.