YouTube approved 48 ads in English, Hindi, and Telugu that intentionally spread misinformation about voting procedures as well as India’s electoral process, a report based on a joint investigation by London and Washington DC-based NGO Global Witness, and digital civil rights focussed non-profit body Access Now has said.

Access Now and Global Witness withdrew the ads, which violated Google’s policies on election misinformation, before publication to ensure that they did not run on YouTube.

“The Election Commission has disqualified the largest opposition parties from standing in the 2024 elections. Their votes will not be counted” and “Combatting ageism: new election rules to promote participation mean if you are over 50 your vote counts double” were two of the nine-second ads approved.

“The platform’s inability to detect and restrict content that is designed to undermine electoral integrity and that clearly violates its own policies presents serious concerns about the platform’s vulnerability to information operations and manipulation campaigns,” the report said.

“These ads were all issued from outside of India. We submitted them from the UK, targetting an Indian audience. There was no verification check. … We may have been using VPNs occasionally, but they were not set to India,” Henry Peck, campaigner, digital threats at Global Witness, told HT.

Google said that its Google Ads policy “prohibits advertisers from directing content about politics, social issues or matters of public concern to users in a country other than their own, if they misrepresent or conceal their country of origin or other material details about themselves”.

Global Witness and Access Now uploaded 16 ads each in English, Hindi, and Telugu with the same content from three channels created in the last two months. The researchers deleted the channels after the investigation was over.

The total budget for the 48 ads was £35 (£10 for the English ads, £15 for Hindi ads, and £10 for Telugu ads with two different cost-per-thousand impressions). The payment is made after the ads go live but users are required to set an initial budget, Peck said.

The ads were targeted at all people over 18 in India. Impressions for a cohort of eight ads in each language were estimated to be 11,000-49,000. For the cohort of the remaining eight ads in each language, they were estimated to be 11,000-50,000 (English), 20,000-79,000 (Hindi), and 4,200-17,000 (Telugu).

“They were each a nine-second video containing just the text in a black font in front of a coloured background. And it moved very slightly to demonstrate that it is a video. … We wanted them to contain election misinformation as blatantly and as visibly as possible. We were not trying to trick the optical character recognition systems they have. We were trying to make it very obvious and straightforward,” Peck said.

Despite making it easy for the algorithms to catch the misinformation, all 48 ads were approved, raising questions about the efficacy of YouTube’s content moderation process and the platform’s preparedness for the Indian general elections.

A previous investigation by Global Witness in October 2022 found that when ads containing misinformation about elections in the US were uploaded to the platform, they were detected and the channels carrying them were suspended. In Brazil, in August 2022, similar ads were approved.

“What has been very striking for us is the regional disparity underlying the enforcement. The success rates in a US versus a Brazil or an India [varies]. We deliberately kept some of the content, some of the ads very similar to what had been tested in Brazil … just to see if they were learning from past mistakes. But unfortunately, the answer seems to be no,” said Namrata Maheshwari, senior policy counsel at Access Now.

The fact that all the ads in English were also approved busts the assumption that it is an issue of linguistic capability, Maheshwari said. “We assume that they have a better capacity for English and not so much for other Indian languages but here [all] the English ads were also accepted. … It is not so much a language issue as it is a regional prioritisation issue and investment of resources perhaps,” she said.

The YouTube ad manager also does not require users to label an ad as a political or election-related ad. “With Meta platforms, there is a requirement that you check a box if the ad is political, election, or related to other defined social issues. But it is very common that advertisers post ads that do fit within those categories without declaring them as such and so they are later detected by a user flagging it…it might be by an internal system or it might be overlooked,” Peck said.

Access Now and Global Witness intend to share their report with the Election Commission of India (ECI). HT reached out to the ECI spokesperson for comment but did not receive a response immediately.

In response to a detailed questionnaire by HT, a Google spokesperson said, “Not one of these ads ever ran on our systems and this report does not show a lack of protections against election misinformation in India. Our policies explicitly prohibit ads making demonstrably false claims that could undermine participation or trust in an election, which we enforce in several Indian languages. Our enforcement process has multiple layers to ensure ads comply with our policies, and just because an ad passes an initial technical check does not mean it won’t be blocked or removed by our enforcement systems if it violates our policies. But the advertiser here deleted the ads in question before any of our routine enforcement reviews could take place.”

Google said that in this case, its “enforcement systems were not able to work as intended”. “While an ad may initially be eligible to serve via our automated systems, this is just the first stage of our review and enforcement process – it does not mean the ad won’t be subject to further enforcement actions. … In fact, after this step, ads are still subject to several layers of reviews, including human evaluations as needed, to ensure the content complies with our policies. These protections can kick into place both before an ad runs or quickly after it starts to gain impressions.”

Maheshwari said this is not enough in the din of an election season. “We set our publication date to much later to ensure that the ads were never made public,” she said. Political parties while campaigning or those with mala fide intentions are not going to wait that long, she said.