By Pascal Oparada, Social Media/Tech Reporter
For a company with a commanding online presence, Google is moving to fight misinformation as the European Union prepares for Parliamentary elections this May.
The tech giant has introduced a number of measures to bring fake news down to the barest minimum.
The company is collaborating with a number of teams who are mainly based in Europe and are trained to identify and stop a wide range of potential abuse that can range from State Sponsored phishing attacks to attempts to alter Maps so people can’t find their polling station.
“We’re also constantly working to get people to authoritative content and improving our systems to combat the effects of disinformation. We’re staffed so we can get ahead of abuse, clamp down on malicious activity, and react rapidly to breaking threats,” Google said.
It is also deploying its Project Shield for political campaigns, journalists and NGOs in Europe. Google said it is ready to defend these people from digital attacks that can exploit many thousands of computers to overwhelm a website’s servers and take it offline—preventing voters from getting official information when they need it most
Project Shield uses Google’s infrastructure to protect independent news sites from distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS).
Google is also conducting in-person security training from experts. The company said it has trained 1,000 campaign and election officials, journalists and people from election-related NGOs in Europe, so they can learn the right security tools they need and how to use them.
“Our goal is to support these groups in keeping their information secure and enable them to publish freely so that people can access the stories, debates, policies and results when it matters most,” Google said.
It also introduced a new verification process for election-related campaign adverts.
“Anyone wanting to run EU parliamentary election ads on Google’s platforms must provide documentation to show they’re an EU-based entity or citizen of an EU member country – and we will provide disclosures on each ad to make it clear to voters who are paying for the advertising,” Google said about the process.
In November 2018, First Draft, a UK based agency in partnership with International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) launched CrossCheck Nigeria, a collaborate project which brought journalists from major newsrooms in Nigeria to fight misinformation ahead the elections in the country this year.
CrossCheck Nigeria has worked tirelessly to debunk major misinformation that otherwise would have been injurious to the 2019 elections.
