The Silicon Review ^Asia

Google India plans to conduct an exercise to fetch information about spending on political advertisements for the Lok Sabha elections next year. The exercise is similar to the one Google conducted during the recent mid-term elections in the United States.The company headquartered in Mountain View, California attempted to strictly monitor the expenditures on political advertisements in the U.S. It also issued guidelines according to which the political parties needed to disclose the money spent on political advertisements. A weekly transparency report was also released during the US elections that listed political advertisement expenditure and theparty affiliations.

Sunita Mohanty, Director of Trust and Safety at Google India mentioned in an interview that the company is planning for a similar control in India’s elections. “In the recent US elections, we had a tight control on who is spending on election advertisement and how we are controlling information on elections. We launched a transparency report on the kind of political advertisements that were being run,” she further added.Google is also planning to work on tools to investigate the fake news that is generally spread during elections.

As per the company’s regulations,an advertisermust be a verified one in order to advertise political parties or agendas on Google Ads Services. While Google uses personalized advertisement to help customers make better choices, it doesn’t promote any factors such as sexual orientations, medical conditions or political interests.