Our Trust and Safety team has taken action against abuse on our platforms, which has allowed us to further bolster the safety and security of our products throughout this election. More broadly, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has continued to monitor, disrupt, and share findings on government-backed attack campaigns, information operations, and more — observing activity across the online ecosystem that was limited in scale with minimal impact compared to previous cycles. In addition, today Mandiant reported it observed that state-aligned actors promoted election-related narratives to generate the perception of foreign influence and to foment political divisions. Across our security teams, we have been working to provide regular updates on our ongoing research and threat intelligence to help thwart these activities.

We also continued to rely on our longstanding policies and enforcement systems to combat violative content on our platforms, such as demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in elections. In particular, we expanded our detection and rapid response resources in non-English languages to prevent the spread of harmful election-related misinformation. We aim to have clear, consistent, and fair policies — and always apply them in a neutral and apolitical way — so that users trust the information they see on our platforms.

In addition, in 2022 we continued to expand our verification and transparency efforts for election ads, verifying more than 5,800 new advertising accounts in the U.S. We also maintained strong investments in our ads policies and enforcement systems, and we were able to continue to detect and remove ads on our platforms that violated our policies, including false or misleading claims around elections and voting procedures, as well as threats to election workers.