Today we’re sharing really this year’s European Parliamentary elections showed up connected YouTube, and what we do successful these moments to thief guarantee precocious value predetermination contented thrives connected our platform. Viewers from crossed nan European Union came to YouTube to perceive straight from candidates, dive into run issues, and enactment informed connected nan latest updates. Here’s really it played out.

Connecting voters to charismatic predetermination content

Accessing trusted accusation is an important portion of antiauthoritarian engagement. That’s why we’ve developed features that make it easier to find predetermination contented from charismatic sources, successful hunt results, salient news shelves, and connected nan ‘Watch Next’ panel. This is YouTube’s proposal strategy astatine work. Leading up to June 9 and since, this strategy helped viewers crossed Europe find charismatic predetermination contented successful aggregate EU languages.

Election accusation panels besides made it easier for group to registry to vote, find retired really to vote, study much astir nan candidates, and to entree nan predetermination results. In total, these dedicated predetermination features appeared to YouTube viewers crossed nan EU complete 1.1 cardinal times.

Removing harmful contented earlier it’s wide viewed

Our Trust & Safety squad has spent years building a playbook for protecting nan YouTube organization and responding quickly to emerging threats – they’ve deployed it for galore elections astir nan world, including crossed nan EU this year. This includes removing videos that might, for example, mislead voters connected really to vote, incite violence, aliases beforehand definite types of predetermination misinformation. We enforced our policies crossed languages, sloppy of a speaker’s nationalist floor plan aliases politics.

As of June 9, we terminated complete 1,000 channels and removed complete 140 EU election-related videos for violating our Community Guidelines, including our policies astir manipulated content and misattributed footage.

YouTube besides has complete 100 Priority Flaggers crossed nan EU, who person further devices to emblem perchance violative contented for review. These NGOs and authorities agencies screen a wide scope of expertise, including dislike reside and misinformation, complementing nan efforts of Google’s 20,000 world contented reviewers and our automated systems.

Tackling disinformation campaigns

Our dedicated teams besides worked astir nan timepiece for respective months to place coordinated power operations attempting to interfere pinch this election. For example, successful May, moving pinch Google’s Threat Analysis Group, we terminated 21 YouTube channels arsenic portion of our ongoing investigation into disinformation campaigns linked to Russia. The channels shared contented successful various EU languages pinch narratives captious of nan home conditions successful EU countries and US/EU financial assistance for nan warfare successful Ukraine.

By nan clip polls closed, arsenic portion of our proactive sum for these elections, we terminated 240 channels for being portion of coordinated power operations targeting nan EU.

Increasing transparency astir AI-generated content

Ahead of nan elections, we introduced caller updates to thief viewers understand erstwhile they are watching a video that contains realistic altered aliases synthetic content. Creators are now required to disclose erstwhile they upload this type of content, aft which we adhd a transparency explanation truthful that viewers person this important context.

In nan first half of June, nan altered aliases synthetic explanation was shown much than 40 cardinal times connected videos successful nan EU. We besides applied our long-standing policies prohibiting harmful misinformation.

Protecting nan YouTube organization remains our number 1 priority, some astatine predetermination clip and each twelvemonth round. We’ll proceed to activity together pinch governments, manufacture and NGOs crossed nan European Union and beyond, connected these efforts. And our dedicated teams will use these insights and lessons to our ongoing activity supporting predetermination integrity astir nan world.