To begin with, Google’s systems keep a constant eye on the unusual patterns in contributed content. When it detects suspicious activity, it acts quickly and may implement protections including taking down policy-violating content to temporarily disabling new contributions to prevent further abuse
California:
Google has shared details about how it prevents policy-violating content from being published on Google Maps, ensuring that only accurate and helpful content is published on the platform.
“Over 300 million contributors share their experiences on Google Maps each year, helping people get the latest information for more than 250 million places around the world. With over 20 million reviews, photos, business hour updates and other contributions added to Maps each day, we’re invested in making sure information is accurate and unhelpful content is removed,” Google wrote in a post.
To begin with, Google’s systems keep a constant eye on the unusual patterns in contributed content. When it detects suspicious activity, it acts quickly and may implement protections including taking down policy-violating content to temporarily disabling new contributions to prevent further abuse.
Secondly, Google Maps proactively protects places during times when it anticipates a surge in off-topic and unhelpful content.
For instance, during the 2020 U.S. elections, Google limited the ability for people to suggest edits to phone numbers, addresses and other factual information for places like voting sites to help prevent the spread of misinformation related to the elections.
For places where user contributions are found to be consistently unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic, such as police stations and prisons, Google uses a set of frameworks to evaluate how helpful user input might be for these types of places.
On the basis of this outcome, Google applies restrictions – from limiting contributions to blocking a specific type of content to blocking contributed content altogether.
“In these instances, we may inform users when contributions to certain places can’t be accepted. For example, if someone is looking to write a review for a prison on Google Maps, they may find a notification banner that says this functionality is turned off with a link to learn more about our policies,” Google explained.