Success in mitigating disinformation rests on joint effort, says Google

According to Google, such efforts must be partnered with efforts to educate users and organisations

Google Australia believes long term success in mitigating disinformation and foreign influence through social media rests on the development of a culture of online safety across society, including through ongoing “collaboration” between the likes of industry, the technical community, and government.

According to Google, such efforts must be partnered with efforts to educate users and organisations, from school students through to senior citizens and company employees on how to secure their online presence and to “apply critical thinking to the information they see and consume”.

The remarks were made in the company’s submission to the Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media.

In its submission to the committee looking into the risk posed by foreign interference through social media, the local arm of the search giant said it takes its responsibility “very seriously”.

How companies like Google address these concerns has an impact on society and on the trust users place in our services, it wrote.

We believe that meeting it begins with providing transparency into our policies, inviting feedback, enabling users to understand and control their online engagement, and collaborating with policymakers, civil society, and academics around the world in the development of sensible, effective policies, and processes, it stated.

In its submission, Google said algorithms cannot determine whether a piece of content on current events is true or false, nor can they assess the intent of its creator just by reading what’s on a page. It said, however, there are clear cases of intent to manipulate or deceive users.

For instance, a news website that alleges it contains ‘Reporting from Canberra, Australia’ but whose account activity indicates that it is operated out of Eastern Europe is likely not being transparent with users about its operations or what they can trust it to know firsthand, Google wrote.

It said the policies across Google Search, Google News, YouTube, and its advertising products outline behaviours that are prohibited to address such situations.

Google also removed more than a thousand YouTube channels that were apparently part of a large campaign and that were “behaving in a coordinated manner”.

We intentionally send warnings in timed batches to all users who may be at risk, rather than at the moment we detect the threat itself, so that attackers cannot track some of our defence strategies, the submission said. We also notify law enforcement about what we’re seeing, as they have additional tools to investigate these attacks.

The search giant also said it detected 18 million malware and phishing Gmail messages per day related to COVID-19, in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related daily spam messages.

Our machine learning models have evolved to understand and filter these threats, and we continue to block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching our users.

Google’s TAG has specifically identified over a dozen government-backed attacker groups using COVID-19 themes as lure for phishing and malware attempts — trying to get their targets to click malicious links and download files, including in Australia, it added.

It said, we have an important responsibility to our users and to the societies in which we operate to curb the efforts of those who aim to propagate false information on our platforms.