Protecting election information from digital attacks
Free tools to help defend information when it matters most.
Play filmHelping voters get the full story
Elections matter. Information matters. And during elections, access to accurate information matters.
Misleading news reports can sway opinions. Digital attacks can take important websites offline, silencing information when voters need it most.
Protect Your Election provides tools to help stay protected from these digital attacks, and resources that support reliable election information and reporting.
How can Protect Your Election help?
If you run a campaign
Strengthen security to help ensure that voters can visit your website.
If you're a candidate
Add extra security to your account to keep personal information private.
If you run a site with election information
Protect your website from attacks so that voters can access election information when they need it.
If you run a news site
Protect election coverage and debate from digital attacks on your platform, and find tools to encourage accurate reporting and quality journalism.
If you're a journalist
Increase the security of your account to keep your information safe, and find fact checking and verification resources to support your work.
Tools to protect against digital attacks
Protect accounts
People who are critical to elections are at risk of targeted phishing What is a phishing attack? A phishing attack happens when someone tries to trick you into sharing personal information online. attacks. The Advanced Protection Program offers Google’s strongest security, designed to help protect policy makers, candidates, campaign teams, journalists, and activists.
Why you need Advanced Protection
If someone gains What is unauthorised account access? Unauthorised account access can happen when someone gets through the password layer of an account without the user’s permission. to an account, they could view emails, contacts, photos, and other private information. They could also impersonate owners or lock them out of their accounts during pivotal election moments.
How it protects you
When you enroll in Advanced Protection, you'll get a suite of extra security for your Google Account. To protect you from malicious or insecure apps, the program limits which third-party apps can access sensitive data, like emails, contacts, and Drive files. To protect your account against phishing, the program requires physical Security Keys (in addition to your password) to sign into your account, giving you the strongest form of two-factor authentication. What is two-factor authentication? Also known as 2-Step Verification, this means that logging into your account requires a second security step beyond just your username and password. With it enabled, a hacker can’t access your account without a code you enter, a prompt on your phone, or a physical Security Key.
Learn moreWhat else you can do
Protect websites
Project Shield is a free service that uses Google technology to help protect news, election and campaign sites from DDoS attacks, a simple and inexpensive way to take a website down and prevent voters from accessing vital election information.
Why you need Project Shield
A DDoS attack can take a website offline by overwhelming it with traffic. Thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of visits are sent to a site at the same time. This can be used to target investigative work, silence journalism, attack candidates, and stop freedom of information during elections. Many sites don't have protection for this and might not know what's causing the problem.
How it protects you
Project Shield can mitigate the risk of a DDoS attack. Project Shield acts as a layer of defence, blocking unwanted traffic that's been sent to take your site down. It uses a reverse proxy to filter bad traffic on your site's behalf, so attacks don't even reach your website's server.
Apply nowApply via desktop at g.co/shield.
Protect conversations
Discussing politics, policies, and candidates around an election can be difficult. The threat of online abuse means that many people stop expressing themselves and give up on seeking different opinions. Perspective is an API that can help.
Why you need Perspective
The Perspective API makes it easier for news sites and commenting platforms to host better conversations online. Perspective enables platforms to scale human moderation by identifying toxic comments for review. Developers and publishers can assist moderators and give real-time feedback to commenters, allowing comment sections to remain open as a positive forum for political conversation.
How it protects you
By reducing the amount of abuse and harassment on websites and commenting platforms, people can more freely share their ideas and viewpoints. This is critical during elections when voters are discussing sensitive, personal topics online.
Learn moreResources that support quality election reporting
During elections, misleading, low quality, offensive, and downright false information can be used to influence voters. Here are some resources to help you report, debunk, and verify information online.
Fact Check
Give voters more information on viral news stories and related issues with Fact Check tags, which help verify or debunk claims and statistics online. To include your articles in this feature, visit Schema.org or get started with this widget created with the Duke University Reporters Lab.
Direct Feedback
Flag potentially offensive or unhelpful content that appears in Autocomplete and Featured Snippets on Google Search using our new direct feedback tool. Your feedback helps improve our Search algorithms.
News Lab
Take Google News Lab's Verification Course and learn about tools that can help you verify the authenticity of images, videos and reports.