Google supports the upcoming general election 2023 in Thailand

Getting voters the information they need

Google raises high-quality information from authoritative sources in search results, recommendations, and information panels, helping Thais find accurate and helpful information related to this coming election.

On YouTube, the Top News and Breaking News sections highlight quality journalism while information panels provide publisher context that indicates funding sources below videos from channels that receive public or government funding.

Saranee Boonritthongchai, Country Marketing Manager, Google Thailand, said “In the lead-up to the election, we understand that Thais need helpful and relevant information to help them navigate the electoral process. Recently, we launched a Google Trends Thailand General Election page to make it easier for the media and general public to find this data for their stories. We have focused our efforts on supporting the 52 million Thais who are expected to cast their vote and over 3 million first-time voters in the upcoming election this year by helping them connect to useful and relevant election-related information online, ensuring that our products offer unbiased, authoritative, and timely information to voters wherever they are. To curb misinformation at the source, we also trained and engaged journalists and newsrooms on reporting authoritative and credible news ahead of the election cycle.” 

Working with the news industry to protect election information online

Ahead of Thailand’s 2023 general election, the Google News Initiative (GNI), in collaboration with Cofact, Sure and Share, AFP Thailand, and Punch Up, hosted the GNI Election 2023 Workshop in which more than 70 Thai journalists learned how to use the digital tools, trends, and essential technical skills needed for the election coverage through training sessions led by experts in election misinformation and data visualization.

In addition, GNI Digital Security Training Workshop, organized by the News Lab team, empowered Thai journalists with tools to help protect them from online attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and phishing.

In addition, Google is also working with journalists and news publishers to ensure the security of their online platforms. The Advanced Protection Program (APP), Google’s strongest level of account security for those who need it, is available at no charge to them. So too, is Project Shield, a free service that uses Google technology to protect news sites from DDoS attacks on the web. 

Tackling misinformation on Google’s platforms

The Google Ad policies and YouTube Community Guidelines help ensure that everyone understands digital best practices and their responsibility during elections. Google has policies governing misinformation - including election misinformation, Covid-19 medical misinformation, and vaccine misinformation - across its platforms. 

Mukpim Anantachai, Head of YouTube Partnerships, Thailand & Vietnam, said “Election integrity is a top priority for YouTube, and we’ve been working to ensure the right policies and systems are in place to support elections. On top of connecting people to authoritative and quality information, we remove violative content in a timely manner with the help of machine learning and trained reviewers.  Our goal is to maintain the right balance between protecting our community from harm and enabling a diversity of viewpoints to thrive on YouTube.”

In Q4 2022, violative content made up 0.09%-0.11% of views on YouTube. More than 5.6 million videos and over 6.4 million channels were removed for violating YouTube Community Guidelines. Of these, over 69,000 videos were removed in Thailand. People can report content that they believe violates our policies, including misinformation, here.

Google continues to think about elections and how it can further support democratic processes around the world, including helping to connect people to useful and relevant election-related information and working to protect election information online.