Google announced that it will update its policies to stop allowing political ads to be served in Brazil via Google Ads, which includes YouTube, display alongside search results and other types of advertising contracted by the company’s tool.
In a note, the company says that this update “will take place in May with a view to the entry into force of electoral resolutions for 2024”.
Approved at the end of February, the resolution of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), among other provisions, made it mandatory for platforms to have libraries of advertisements for political electoral content. This resolution also provides that this measure is “permanently enforceable, including in non-election years and pre- and post-election periods”.
Furthermore, it prohibited companies that sell any type of content promotion from making “this service available for broadcasting a notoriously untrue or seriously decontextualized fact that could affect the integrity of the electoral process.”
In this case, the resolution also says that, when this type of content has been promoted “irregularly”, the Electoral Court may determine that the platforms broadcast, “by promotion and at no cost”, informative content that elucidates a notoriously untrue fact “in same format and scope of contracting”.
“For this year’s Brazilian elections, we will update our Google Ads political content policy to no longer allow political ads to be broadcast in the country. This update will take place in May with a view to the entry into force of electoral resolutions for 2024”, he states Google note.
“We are globally committed to supporting the integrity of the elections and will continue to engage with authorities regarding this matter,” the text adds. Information about the change in policy was released by Poder360 and confirmed by Sheet.
In 2022, Google included Brazil among the countries that had transparency reports about political ads on their platforms.
The company follows its own classification criteria, including in the report advertisements that refer to political parties, candidates for positions at federal and state level or even occupants of these positions. In 2022, the company initially announced that it would only publish candidates at the federal level and later included the state level.
With the new Electoral Court rule, the availability refers to “people holding elected positions, candidates” and includes more categories, such as “government proposals, bills, exercise of the right to vote and other political rights or related matters to the electoral process”.
The resolution says that the company that offers promotion of political-electoral content must maintain a repository of these advertisements to “monitor, in real time, the content, values, those responsible for payment and the characteristics of the population groups that make up the audience (profiling) of contracted advertising”.
Regardless of the TSE rule, for it to be effective this year, the maintenance of Google’s transparency report would already depend on an expansion of the list published in 2022, which dealt with federal and state positions, given that mayoral positions are up for grabs this year. and councilor in more than 5,000 Brazilian municipalities.
In 2022, Google’s transparency report arrived in Brazil later than in other countries. In the United States, it had been available since 2018. At the time of its launch in Brazil, it was also available in the European Union, United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, India, New Zealand and Taiwan.
