Preparing for the U.S. elections in November

As we near Election Day in the United States, we’re building on our existing efforts and providing an update on our latest initiatives, tools and safeguards:

Continuing to help people find authoritative information

Leading up to Election Day, we’re focused on providing people with high-quality and reliable information from non-partisan organizations. Here are some of our features and partnerships to help people find information on candidates, voting processes and voting locations:

• Search: As we have in past elections, we’re rolling out a feature on Search that helps people across the U.S. find authoritative information on how they can register to vote. When you search for information on the voter registration process in your state, you'll soon be able to find aggregated resources and information from state election offices, provided by Democracy Works. As always, this feature will be available to all users in the U.S.
• YouTube: In the coming weeks, viewers in the U.S. will see a range of features to connect them with helpful election information. When searching for federal election 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’ll show reminders on where and how to vote on the YouTube homepage.
• Google Play: We recently launched a new badge for apps that are from official government agencies. This will help point people to trustworthy information, including for voting.
• Gen AI products: Last December, we announced we would restrict responses for election-related queries on the Gemini apps and web experience. As we integrate Gen AI into more consumer experiences, we’re also applying election-related restrictions to many of these products, including Search AI Overviews, YouTube AI-generated summaries for Live Chat, Gems, and image generation in Gemini. Particularly for federal and state-wide elections, our users depend on us to provide reliable and up-to-date information on topics like current candidates, voting processes and election results — and this new technology can make mistakes as it learns or as news breaks. For many of these queries on Gemini, we also provide a link connecting users directly to Google Search for the latest and most accurate information.

Monitoring and staying ahead of abuse trends

Our threat intelligence teams continue to monitor for influence operations and cyber attacks across our platforms and the wider ecosystem. Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) recently posted about APT42, an Iranian government-backed threat actor, and their targeted phishing campaigns against accounts associated with Israeli military and government officials, as well as individuals associated with the U.S. presidential election. When it comes to coordinated influence operations, we are not seeing dramatic shifts in tactics compared to previous election cycles. To the extent we’re seeing bad actors use AI, it is generally to increase the speed or scale of their information operations, rather than deploying new strategies. In response, we are utilizing AI tools to better detect problematic content and combat their efforts.

We also remain vigilant in tracking and addressing new content or techniques that could violate our long-standing product policies on topics such as manipulated media or demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust in democratic processes (for example, an ad that misleads users about voting dates). We enforce these policies regardless of political affiliation or content.

Increasing security protections for high-risk users

Understanding the patterns and trends of threat actors helps inform our approach to keeping all users and their personal information safe — but this is especially important for high-risk users during election cycles. We continue to develop best-in-class security technology and to offer free trainings and tools for high-risk users including elected officials, campaign workers, government officials, and journalists:

• Advanced Protection Program: We encourage high-risk users to sign up for Google’s free Advanced Protection Program (APP). We recently integrated passkeys into APP to further increase account security.
• Security training and keys: In partnership with non-partisan organizations like Defending Digital Campaigns and through Google’s Campaign Security Project, we’ve conducted security training sessions for thousands of local campaign staff in all political parties and electoral workers in all 50 states across the U.S. This year, we’re providing 100,000 Titan security keys to high-risk users.
• Workspace For Campaigns — Account Security Fundamentals: We encourage campaigns that are Workspace customers to enroll in Workspace for Campaigns, a free one-click feature to immediately configure 26 core security settings for the entire team. This feature is available to all campaigns who are eligible for support from Defending Digital Campaigns.
• Project Shield: We encourage all websites supporting the election to sign up for Project Shield to increase stability during the election cycle. Project Shield helps protect against both distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and legitimate traffic surges, and provides free protection for websites that host information on political candidates, voting, poll monitoring, and any other websites supporting the election process.

Bringing more transparency to AI-generated content

For several years, we’ve invested in tools and labeling efforts to help people understand whether AI was used to alter or create the content they’re viewing online. We’re pleased to share these updates to our context tools and partnerships:

• Expanding SynthID: We’re continuing to bring SynthID — embedded watermarking — to additional Google Gen AI tools for content creation and more forms of media including text, audio, visual and video. For instance, images generated by Gemini, including with our most recent Imagen 3 model, are embedded with SynthID watermarks.
• Automated YouTube Ad disclosures: We require advertisers to disclose when an ad or video includes synthetic content that does not authentically depict real or realistic-looking people or events. Recently, we added Google generated disclosures for YouTube Election Ads for some YouTube formats. Advertisers will now simply click a checkbox when their YouTube ad meets our disclosure requirements for synthetic or digitally altered content and they’ll have a Google-generated disclosure placed in their ad.
• Industry collaboration: Earlier this year, we joined the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a cross-industry effort to help provide more transparency and context for people on AI-generated content. As a steering committee member, we are helping to develop and increase adoption of this important provenance technology across platforms.

Continuing this work through Election Day

We’re proud that our platforms are used by people and campaigns of every background and belief, and that we've built tools to keep campaigns secure online. There have been dozens of elections around the world this year from India to the European Union to Mexico, where we did similar work. We'll continue to take steps to help keep users safe leading up to, during, and after this year’s U.S. election.