Google Maps gets new tools to crack down on political vandalism

On first glance, Google Maps doesn’t really seem like a hotbed of political activism — it’s more of a “my car’s on E right now, where the heck is the nearest gas station??” kind of problem solver, mostly concerned with getting us where we need to go. But every so often we hear about it becoming an unexpected platform for political discourse — like when the Gulf of “America” found itself review-bombed by users protesting the name-change. Stories like those might be a little less frequent going forward, though, as Maps channels Gemini to block content like that at the source.

We’re actually looking at some new Google Maps safeguards against unwanted contributions on two fronts today. First, there’s reviews. Here, Google says that it’s enhancing the tools it uses to spot spammy reviews of local business. That could probably include unwanted political commentary, but it feels like Google’s mainly interested in stopping people from trying to blackmail businesses with a swarm of bad reviews. Over the next few weeks, you should start seeing alerts in Maps if the reviews you’re viewing got so bad that Google had to temporarily block further submissions.

What’s a little more interesting is how Google also says that it’s using Gemini in Maps to block attempts to vandalize place names. This one we don’t hear about quite so often, but every once in a while one slips through and makes the news, like it did back in 2016 with New York City’s “Dump” Tower.

Well, we hope you had your fun with that, because it sounds much more difficult to get away with it going forward. Google’s using Gemini to flag edits to place names — and specifically, it’s looking for changes that might be pushing social or political commentary — and stop them from ever becoming publicly visible in Maps in the first place.

Nothing about this represents any policy change for Google — this is just about better, more automated enforcement. Google Maps policies forbid “content which contains general, political, or social commentary or personal rants.”