Our Approach to Content Safety - Google Safety Center
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Overview
Safer by Design
Learn how we're Safer by Design
Privacy
Privacy Practices
Discover how we build products that protect your privacy.
Ads & Data
Learn about our advertising principles and your ad experience.
Security
Built-in Security
Learn how built-in security keeps your personal information safe.
Scams & Fraud
Explore how we protect you from online scams and fraud.
Security Tips
Discover tools and tips to help keep you safe online.
Authentication
Learn about safer ways to sign in to your online accounts.
Cybersecurity
See how we lead cybersecurity in our approach and societal impact.
AI
AI & Safety
Learn about how we are advancing AI safety with testing and standards.
Secure AI Framework
Learn about the core elements of our secure AI framework (SAIF).
Content
Content Safety
Learn about our protections against harmful and illegal content.
Product Protections
Learn more about Product Protections
Android
Android's ML-powered security guards against threats and protects privacy.
Gmail
Gmail blocks threats and keeps your messages encrypted.
Nest
Nest keeps your data private with built-in security and automatic updates.
Assistant
Assistant protects your privacy, and puts you in control of your data.
Google Fi Wireless
Google Fi Wireless protects your connection for calls, streaming, and browsing.
Photos
Photos keeps your memories safe with built-in security and privacy tools.
Chrome
Chrome guards against threats with safety checks and real-time detection.
Google One
Google One protects your expanded storage with industry-leading cloud security.
Pixel
Pixel keeps you safer both online and in the physical world.
Family Link
Family Link helps parents set digital boundaries for their families.
Google Pay
Google Pay protects your payments and keeps your personal information safe.
Search
Google Search encrypts your searches, protects your data, and blocks threats.
Google Health
Google Health protects your health and wellness data and provides easy-to-use privacy settings.
Maps
Maps gives you privacy with Incognito mode and location history settings.
YouTube
YouTube protects your data with privacy tools and personalized viewing controls.
Gemini
Gemini blocks harmful content and provides easy access to your privacy settings.
Meet
Meet makes video calls safer with encryption and smart meeting management tools.
Safety Settings
Learn more about Safety Settings
Ad Settings
Learn about ad controls and how to customize your ad experiences.
Security Settings
Learn about security controls and how to add protection to your Google Account.
Privacy Settings
Learn about privacy controls and how to customize your data settings.
Parental Controls
Learn about parental controls and how to keep your family safer online.
Google Account
Safer by Design
Content safety
Information and content you can trust
At Google, we aim to balance delivering information with protecting users and society. We take this responsibility seriously. Our goal is to provide access to trustworthy information and content by protecting users from harm, delivering reliable information, and partnering with experts and organizations to create a safer internet.
Protecting you from harm
Delivering reliable information
Partnering to create a safer internet
Protecting you from harm
We keep you and society at large safe with advanced protections that not only prevent, but also detect and respond to harmful and illegal content.
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Prevent
Preventing abuse
To keep people safe from abusive content, we use protections powered by machine learning. Gmail automatically blocks nearly 10 million spam emails from inboxes every minute, and Search has tools to prevent Autocomplete from suggesting potentially harmful queries. Automatic detection helps YouTube remove harmful content efficiently, effectively, and at scale — in Q2 of 2023, 93% of policy-violative videos removed from YouTube were first detected automatically. We also implement safety guardrails in our generative AI tools to minimize the risk of their being used to create harmful content.
In addition, each of our products is governed by a set of policies that outlines acceptable and unacceptable content and behaviors. Our policies are continuously honed and updated to address emerging risks. When it comes to our work in AI, we also rely on our AI Principles to guide product development and help us test and evaluate every AI application before it launches.
Detect
Detecting harmful content
As the tactics of bad actors evolve, we must work even harder to detect harmful content that gets onto our products. AI is helping us scale abuse detection across our platforms. AI-powered classifiers help quickly flag potentially harmful content for removal or escalation to a human reviewer. In 2022, automated enforcement helped us detect and block over 51.2 million ads with hate speech, violence, and harmful health claims. Additionally, large language models, a breakthrough type of AI, show the promise of exponentially reducing the time it takes to detect and evaluate harmful material, especially from new and emerging risks.
We also work with outside organizations that flag content they think may be harmful. Both Google and YouTube take feedback from hundreds of Priority Flaggers, organizations around the world with cultural and subject-matter expertise that escalate content to us for review.
Respond
Responding appropriately
We rely on both people and AI-driven technology to evaluate potential policy violations and respond appropriately to content that is flagged. When a piece of content violates our policies, we can restrict, remove, demonetize, or take account-level actions to reduce future abuse.
In 2022, Google Maps blocked or removed over 300 million pieces of fake content, 115 million policy-violating reviews, and 20 million attempts to create fake business profiles. In Q2 2023, YouTube removed over 14 million channels and 7 million videos for violating our Community Guidelines.
To evaluate context and nuance, while reducing the risk of over-removal, we rely on ~20,000 expertly trained reviewers to work in a variety of roles to enforce our policies, moderate content, and evaluate flagged content across Google’s products and services.
If a creator or publisher feels we’ve made a wrong call, they have the ability to appeal our decisions.
Delivering reliable
information
We enable confidence in the information and content on our platforms by delivering reliable information and best-in-class tools that put you in control of evaluating content.
How we organize information
Intelligent algorithms
Our constantly updated algorithms are at the heart of everything we do, from products like Google Maps to Search results. These algorithms use advanced large language models and signals like keywords or website and content freshness so that you can find the most relevant, useful results. For example, YouTube prominently surfaces high-quality content from authoritative sources in their search results, recommendations, and info panels to help people find timely, accurate, and helpful news and information.
Tools to help you evaluate content
We created a number of features to help you understand and evaluate the content that our algorithms and generative AI tools have surfaced, ensuring you have more context around what you’re seeing online.
Fact-check in Search and News
Every day Google surfaces independent fact-checks 6 million times. With Google’s advanced image and result fact checking tools, you are more equipped to spot misinformation online.
About this result
“About this result” provides details about a website to help you learn about it before you visit, including its description, when it was first indexed, and what others say about the source and topic.
SynthID watermarking
SynthID is a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images. It is an early and promising technical solution to the pressing problem of misinformation online.
Learn more
About this image
“About this image” helps you assess the credibility and context of images you see online by providing information, like when an image may have first been seen by Google and how other sources use and describe it.
My Ad Center
My Ad Center makes it easy to manage your ad experience so that you see more of the brands you like and less of the ones you don’t.
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Managing content
responsibly on YouTube
YouTube is committed to fostering a responsible platform that the viewers, creators, and advertisers who make up our community can rely on. Learn more about our approach.
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Remove
We remove content that violates our policies — using a combination of people and technology.
Raise
We elevate authoritative sources for news and information, and provide context for viewers.
Reduce
We responsibly manage content by reducing the spread of borderline content and harmful misinformation.
Reward
We reward trusted creators via the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), by sharing ad revenue and a variety of other income sources. Over $50 billion was paid out to creators, artists, and media companies in the three years prior to June 2022 through YPP.
Partnering to create
a safer internet
We proactively collaborate, inform, and share our resources and technologies with experts and organizations.
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Sharing knowledge
Exchanging knowledge to keep you safe
We partner with experts from civil society, academia, and governments to tackle global issues like misinformation, ad safety, election integrity, AI in content moderation, and combating online child exploitation. We also publish research findings and release datasets to academics to further progress in this field.
At YouTube, we regularly consult with our independent Youth and Families Advisory Committee on product and policy updates, including our Youth Principles, as well as a series of product updates centered on teen mental health and well-being.
Sharing signals
Working with experts to fight illegal content
We also work with partners to uncover and share clearcut abusive content signals to enable removal from the wider ecosystem. We share millions of CSAM hashes with the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children every year. We also participate in Project Lantern, a program that enables technology companies to share signals in a secure and responsible way. Additionally, YouTube co-founded the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which brings together the technology industry, government, civil society, and academia to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online.
Sharing resources
Supporting organizations dedicated to safety
We support organizations around the world dedicated to online safety and media literacy through robust programs offering training and materials, such as Be Internet Awesome, YouTube’s Hit Pause, and the Google News Lab. Additionally, Google and Youtube announced a $13.2 million grant to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to support their network of 135 fact-checking organizations. All together, our collaborations have equipped over 550,000 journalists in digital verification skills, and we’ve trained another 2.6 million online.
Actively sharing
safety technology
We share Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that help other organizations protect their platforms and users from harmful content.
Download PDF
Child Safety Toolkit
We give partners like Adobe and Reddit access to our tools, Content Safety API and CSAI Match, which help them to prioritize Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) for human review. These tools help our partners process over four billion pieces of content every month, enabling them to better fight against child sexual abuse online.
Learn more
Safe Browsing API
Safe Browsing API allows client applications to check URLs against our constantly updated lists of unsafe web resources. This tool protects 5 billion devices a day by warning users against sites that host malware or unwanted software.
Learn more
Information-quality APIs
Our information quality APIs empower publishers and platforms to combat toxic and harmful content. Perspective API processes 2 billion comments a day, helping 850+ partners curb toxic comments daily. The New York Times, Reddit, and the Wall Street Journal are some of the organizations using Perspective API to manage abusive comments on their sites.
Vision API
Our Vision API helps developers identify and remove harmful content by allowing them to integrate features like image labeling, optical character recognition (OCR), and explicit content tagging into their applications. With limited training data, Vision API could successfully classify 80% of images.
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GSEC DUBLIN
Taking on content responsibility in Dublin
Our Google Safety Engineering Center for Content Responsibility in Dublin is a regional hub for Google experts working to tackle the spread of illegal and harmful content and a place where we can share this work with policymakers, researchers, and regulators. Our network of Google Safety Engineering Centers give our teams the space, inspiration, and support to develop the next-generation solutions to help improve safety online.
A helpful, safer internet
experience — by design
Never has the impact of our work to provide trustworthy information and content mattered more. To evolve with content moderation challenges, we’ll continue to invest in developing and improving policies, products, and processes that provide you peace of mind and build a safer online experience for all.
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