The 2024 European Parliamentary elections on YouTube

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Our election features appeared to YouTube viewers in the EU over 1.1 billion times.

Connecting voters to authoritative election content

Accessing trusted information is an important part of democratic engagement. That's why we've developed features that make it easier to find election content from authoritative sources, in search results, prominent news shelves, and on the 'Watch Next' panel. This is YouTube's recommendation system at work. Leading up to June 9 and since, this system helped viewers across Europe find authoritative election content in multiple EU languages.

Election information panels also made it easier for people to register to vote, find out how to vote, learn more about the candidates, and to access the election results. In total, these dedicated election features appeared to YouTube viewers across the EU over 1.1 billion times.

We terminated over 1,000 channels and removed over 140 EU election-related videos for violating our policies.

Removing harmful content before it's widely viewed

Our Trust & Safety team has spent years building a playbook for protecting the YouTube community and responding quickly to emerging threats - they've deployed it for numerous elections around the world, including across the EU this year. This includes removing videos that might, for example, mislead voters on how to vote, incite violence, or advance certain types of election misinformation. We enforced our policies across languages, regardless of a speaker's public profile or politics.

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

YouTube also has over 100 Priority Flaggers across the EU, who have additional tools to flag potentially violative content for review. These NGOs and government agencies cover a broad range of expertise, including hate speech and misinformation, complementing the efforts of Google's 20,000 global content reviewers and our automated systems.

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Tackling disinformation campaigns

Our dedicated teams also worked around the clock for several months to identify coordinated influence operations attempting to interfere with this election. For example, in May, working with Google's Threat Analysis Group, we terminated 21 YouTube channels as part of our ongoing investigation into disinformation campaigns linked to Russia. The channels shared content in various EU languages with narratives critical of the domestic conditions in EU countries and US/EU financial aid for the war in Ukraine.

By the time polls closed, as part of our proactive coverage for these elections, we terminated 240 channels for being part of coordinated influence operations targeting the EU.

Increasing transparency around AI-generated content

Ahead of the elections, we introduced new updates to help viewers understand when they are watching a video that contains realistic altered or synthetic content. Creators are now required to disclose when they upload this type of content, after which we add a transparency label so that viewers have this important context.

In the first half of June, the altered or synthetic label was shown more than 40 million times on videos in the EU. We also applied our long-standing policies prohibiting harmful misinformation.

Protecting the YouTube community remains our number one priority, both at election time and all year round. We'll continue to work together with governments, industry and NGOs across the European Union and beyond, on these efforts. And our dedicated teams will apply these insights and lessons to our ongoing work supporting election integrity around the world.

Supporting the 2024 United States election