How Google News fought misinformation in India in 2024
From major elections across the globe to conflicts and crises, the year 2024 was critical for the news industry, said Google News on Wednesday.
Google is on a mission to clean its Play Store, keeping the same in view it took down around 600 “disruptive” Android apps from its Play Store. It also banned their developers who tricked users to click on ads.
According to Google, the reason for banning these apps and their developers was that they breached two of the company’s policies regarding how they advertise.
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To mark such violators, company’s Ad team continuously develop new ways to detect disruptive ads shown outside of the app, for example, out-of-context ads from an app not currently in use.
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“This behaviour violates Google policies, so Google removes these apps from both AdMob and Play Store,” the company said in a statement late Thursday.
“Our investigations are ongoing and when we find violations we will continue to take action,” Google added.
According to Scott Spencer, VP, Product Management, Google Ads, one of the biggest threats to ad-supported content is ad fraud, a pervasive issue for users, developers, and advertisers alike.
He said, “Google blacklisted numerous bad actors that were found to be committing large scale invalid traffic and ad fraud, which violates Google policies.”
A similar action was taken in 2019 when Google removed tens of thousands of apps and developers that were found to be in violation of its policies.
The tech giant said,” Taking corrective action was an imperative step in protecting advertiser dollars, leveling the playing field for legitimate publishers, and removing bad app experiences for users.”
“Android is making fundamental platform changes to minimise interruptions in-app experiences and keep the user more in control of what’s shown on their screen,” informed Google.
Additionally, the Google Play and Ads teams both announced new steps to help ensure that ad content served in apps for children is appropriate for their intended users. The decision was taken after considering the damage caused by ad fraud.
(With input from agencies)
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