TIME – YouTube approved dozens of ads promoting voter suppression and incitement to violence ahead of the upcoming election in India, according to a new investigation by the rights groups Global Witness and Access Now, shared exclusively with TIME.
India, a country often described as the world’s largest democracy, will hold its election in seven phases between April 19 and June 1 of this year. Voters are set to decide whether to return Prime Minister Narendra Modi to rule the country for a third term, or to deal his Hindu nationalist political project an unlikely defeat. In a calendar year where more than half the world’s population will vote in at least 65 different national elections, India’s is by far the biggest. It will also be a crucial test—ahead of the U.S. election in November—of social media platforms’ ability to tackle election disinformation, following a spate of job cuts across the industry.
To test YouTube’s ability to prevent disinformation on its platform, Global Witness and Access Now submitted 48 advertisements containing election-related content prohibited by YouTube rules. The ads were written in three different languages widely spoken in India: Hindi, Telugu, and English. After a 24-hour review period, YouTube approved 100% of the ads. Global Witness and Access Now then withdrew the ads before they were published, meaning no voters were exposed to their contents.
The experiment indicates that Google-owned YouTube may be failing to prevent the spread of paid-for disinformation in one of the most significant global elections of the year. “Frankly, we weren’t expecting such a despicable result,” says Namrata Maheshwari, senior policy counsel at Access Now. “We thought they would do better at least catching the English ads, but they didn’t, which means the problem is not the language—it’s more also a problem of which countries they’re choosing to focus on.” The findings, she said, point to a “lack of regard for the global majority at large” inside YouTube.
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