How Google is Supporting Election Integrity in South Africa

2024 is an important year for elections across the world, with many countries going into the polls to elect their leaders for the forthcoming years. South Africa will hold its 7th democratic elections on 29 May, in a year that marks the country’s 30th anniversary of democracy.

In line with our commitment to helping organise the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful, Google has undertaken a number of steps to support election integrity in South Africa by surfacing high quality information to voters, safeguarding our platforms from abuse and equipping campaigns with the best-in-class security tools and training. We’ll also do this work with an increased focus on the role artificial intelligence (AI) might play. Here is an overview of our efforts:

Connecting people to reliable and trustworthy information

During elections, both seasoned and new voters in South Africa will be actively seeking information around various candidates, voting locations, and campaign agendas. Here are some of the ways we make it easy for people to find what they need:

• Search: Google Search surfaces high quality, authoritative information. When people search for topics like “how to vote,” they will find information about ID requirements, voting stations and more — linking to authoritative sources from our partners such as the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC).
• YouTube: During an election, voters across the country come to YouTube to get news and information from a diverse set of authoritative news sources. For example, when voters search for election-related topics, YouTube’s recommendation system prominently surfaces election content in search results, the homepage and the “watch next” panel. At the same time, human reviewers and machine learning technology combine to detect, review and remove content that violates our policies.
• Ads: To support responsible and transparent political advertising, all advertisers who wish to run election ads in South Africa must complete an identity verification process and display an in-ad disclosure that clearly shows who paid for the ad. We also limit targeting of election ads to the following general categories: age, gender, and general location (postal code level). All election ads are published in our Political Ads Transparency Report, where anyone can look up information such as how much was spent and how many impressions were received.