The rampant spread of misinformation is the biggest challenge that comes with the internet revolution. World-leading tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have had to take stringent measures in curbing this menace. However, political candidates and their campaigns don’t make it easy.
The Indian election of 2019 was closely monitored by Google India to prevent the spread of fake news. Director of Trust and Safety at Google India, Saikat Mitra told a national daily that they set up a framework to track the movement of political information across Google Maps, Youtube, etc.
Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Human monitoring were put together to keep a check on its platform in real-time. To keep false information from spreading during the elections, Google brought in more transparency in advertisements, they provided reports for paid ads and also scanned maps to prevent any vandalism. They also kept their ‘search’ clean.
Since this framework did well for the Indian elections, it will be used in creating a global standard of this framework for all elections. Google is planning to use the same framework for the upcoming US elections in November.
The 2016 US elections faced a lot of backlash from various groups of people claiming that there were misinformation spread and interference from outside sources for their decisions.