Google have joined the war on fake news as they crack down on fake advertising and publishers with misrepresentative content.
A free and open web is a vital resource for people and businesses around the world. And ads play a key role in ensuring you have access to accurate, quality information online.
But bad ads can ruin the online experience for everyone. They promote illegal products and unrealistic offers. They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software.
Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google’s partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself.
The search giant released the numbers as part of its annual fraudulent advertising report, in which the company recaps its efforts to fight scams, malware and other harmful ads over the course of the past year.
Those efforts now extend to deceitful publishers too, thanks to a recent change in the rules governing Google’s AdSense network, which places ads across thousands of third-party sites.
The update was first announced in the wake of the presidential election as Google and other online platforms came under increased scrutiny for their role in spreading deliberately fake news.
Google now avoids using the term “fake news,” however, because the label has become too ambiguous, according to a company spokesperson. Instead, it prefers “misrepresentative content.”
We have a strict set of policies that govern the types of ads we do and don’t allow on Google in order to protect people from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful ads. And we have a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others who are waging a daily fight against bad actors.
Over the years, this commitment has made the web a better place for you—and a worse place for those who seek to abuse advertising systems for their own gain.
In 2016, the internet giant took down 1.7 billion ads that violated their advertising policies, more than double the amount of bad ads we took down in 2015. If you spent one second taking down each of those bad ads, it would take you more than 50 years to finish. Luckily their technology is built to work much faster.
“Last year, we did two key things to take down more bad ads. First, we expanded our policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers. For example, in July we introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users.”
In the six months since launching that policy, they disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads.
Second, they beefed up their technology so they can spot and disable bad ads even faster.
“For example, “trick to click” ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realizing they are often downloading harmful software or malware.”
“In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.”
And judging by last years numbers, the company is not slowing down in the war against misrepresentative content
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