To help people better understand the election ads they see online and support the integrity of elections, earlier this year we implemented a new process to verify advertisers for the EU Parliamentary election. We also require that these verified election ads incorporate a clear “paid for by” disclosure. Today, we are expanding our portfolio of transparency reports to include an EU Political Advertising on Google Transparency Report to show voters who is purchasing election ads on Google in the EU and how much money is being spent. This report includes a searchable election Ad Library that provides valuable data such as which ad had the highest impressions, what the latest election ads running on the Google platform are, and how the ads are targeted in terms of age, gender, and location.
Anyone can access and use this information, which is searchable, so users can easily sort through the data. This report will be updated weekly to capture verified election ads that have one or more impression.
As with our U.S. and India election advertising Transparency Reports, the data from the EU election advertising Transparency Report and Ad Library will be available for anyone with an interest in transparency soon afterwards on Google Cloud’s BigQuery. Using BigQuery’s API, researchers, political watchdogs and private citizens can write code and run their own unique queries on this data set to develop charts, graphs, tables or other visualizations of election advertising on Google platforms.
Supporting elections around the world is hugely important to us. We’ll continue to work in partnership with the EU through its Code of Practice on Disinformation, including by publishing regular reports about our work to prevent abuse, as well as with governments, law enforcement, others in our industry and the NGO community to strengthen protections around elections, protect users, and help combat disinformation.
