Google is allowing ads that show misleading information regarding voting by mail, The Washington Post reported. The tech giant reportedly took five days to review the ads in question before approving them. Now, some are questioning the ad policies and whether Google is prepared to respond to election-related misinformation.

The ads, created by a group known as Protect My Vote, appeared after people in certain states — including Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Arizona, Texas and Georgia — searched for “mail-in voting.” One of them has text that reads, in part, “think mail-in voting and absentee voting are the same. Think again! There are different safeguards for each.” This, the Post points out, isn’t true. In Texas, for example, there are not distinct processes for absentee voting and voting by mail. Clicking on the ads leads to the group’s website, which contains further misinformation. Facebook already removed similar ads from the same group.

Google’s ad policy already forbids advertisers from misrepresenting themselves, but the policy change will prohibit advertisers from working together to distribute misinformation and concealing their affiliations. This could include, for example, a spammy marketing company that creates ads that look like newspaper articles, Smith said. The new policy, should it be broken, will enable Google to take action not just against an individual advertiser but also the network they’re working with.

The other policy change will prohibit advertisers from using hacked and leaked political material in advertisements, or directly linking to it. Discussion of these materials is still allowed, but advertisers cannot give direct access to them. An example of this, Smith said, would be a screenshot of an email that was part of the 2016 leaked Hillary Clinton email archive.

These policy changes are the latest in Google’s ongoing work to combat disinformation in ads. In recent weeks, the tech giant has also banned coronavirus conspiracy ads and ads for ‘intimate partner surveillance’ tech.