Google has presented the results of its new ‘Advertising Safety Report’ in which it is confirmed that the new campaigns are more aggressive and violate the policies set by the company. In all, they withdrew 2 billion more ads than in 2021a rather critical situation.
The more than 5.2 billion ads withdrawn last year have been from services like its own search engine, YouTube or Discover, because they were financially misleading to users, contained misinformation, invited misinformation or encouraged violence. Something more serious is the extension of announcements that denied the existence of tragic events and that justified the war in Ukraine.
This rigorous and in-depth investigation is made possible by a combined effort undertaken by a team of human reviewers and systems automation aided by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Thus, Google demonstrates that not everything is worth it, even if it is paid for.
With the figures in hand, they further restricted 4.3 billion ads and more than 6.7 million advertiser accountsin turn blocking the appearance of new ads in more than 1.5 billion content publisher pages and the execution of measures at the website level on over 143,000 publisher sites.
Google has a total of eleven countries, including Spain, with a service in charge of verifying that financial services that are offered and promoted through their tools are authorized by their local regulator and that they are legal. Only in this way, are they given authorization to promote their products and services.
Financial scams are very common and are closely linked to increasingly sophisticated ones in which malware spreads. Thus, only in 2022, Google reached remove or block up to 142 million ads for breaching its misleading presentation policy and 198 million ads that were in breach of its financial services policy.
The incitement to disinformation
Harmful content and misinformation propagated by its advertising ecosystem deserve special mention. Specifically, Google has exact policies to restrict information that could be harmful to health or undermine trust in political processes or that could promote climate change denial.
Specifically, he came to block more than 24 million ads and ads appearing on more than 300,000 publisher pages for violating these specific policies. To this is added the removal and blocking of more than 51.2 million ads related to inappropriate content. We are talking about messages that incite hatred, violence and false or harmful information about health. In the same way, they were blocked 20.6 million advertisements for dangerous services or productsof the type of weapons and explosives.
The elections they have always been at the forefront of manipulated Google ads to fuel misinformation and cause widespread chaos among users. Thus, the company has agreed to expand the electoral advertising verification and transparency program, with which More than 5,900 new ad accounts have been verified in the United States and more than 2,300 in Brazil. More than 2.6 million election content ads from advertisers who had bypassed the verification process have also been blocked.
The Ukrainian War
This matter has been especially in the spotlight of Google’s restrictive policy, since only during 2022 has it managed to block more than 17 million ads related to the conflict and Withdrawal of advertising from more than 275 media funded by the Russian government.
In this sense, Google adopted measures such as the interruption of the commercial activities of its services in Russia, where they do not show ads or advertising from advertisers in that country, or the monetization of media financed by the Putin government. Since the beginning of the invasion, any announcement that diminishes the seriousness or justifies the armed conflict has been prohibited.
The new Ads Transparency Center
In October, Google launched ‘My Announcement Center’, a tool to control the ads that we can see on the company’s products. In his first months, he received 70 million views Worldwide.
Now, he has put into circulation the new Ads Transparency Center that seeks to facilitate access to information about the advertisements they see in the services of the technology company. Thus, they will be able to analyze the ads that a specific advertiser has published, those that are shown in a certain region or the format and the last date of appearance of an ad.
