Google is today sharing how the company has helped tackle misinformation and bad ads online today. The company says it has blocked 2.3 billion ads in 2018 for violations of its advertising policies. And although 2.3 billion ads is a lot, the company actually removed 3.2 billion ads back in 2017.
This year, Google says the company has introduced a number of new policies and tactics to help users safe online. The company says it has added up to 31 new policies last year that focus on preventing bad ads in areas like third-party tech support, ticket resellers (banning nearly 207,000 ads for ticket resellers), and cryptocurrency. It also banned 58.8 million phishing ads last year.
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The company also launched 330 new detection classifiers to help detect bad ads at the page level, removing nearly 734,000 publishers from its network and bad ads from a total of 1.5m million apps.
Google also talks about how the company’s new policy for election ads has helped the company prevent ad fraud and fake ads. The company says it also removed ads from almost 1.2 million pages last year for misinformation and other low-quality content. “We removed ads from almost 74,000 pages for violating our “dangerous or derogatory” content policy, and took down approximately 190,000 ads for violating this policy. This policy includes a prohibition on hate speech and protects our users, advertisers and publishers from hateful content across platforms,” the company said.
Last year, Google focused on taking the bad actors behind these bad ads down instead of going directly after the bad ads themselves. The company’s “improved machine learning” tech allowed it to identify and ban almost one million bad ad accounts, helping it to get to the root cause of bad ads on its network.