It turns out that Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were not the only tech giants that unknowingly sold political ads to Russian-backed groups during last year’s U.S. presidential election. The Washington Post reported today that Google LLC has discovered that Russian organizations spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads that were shown to American users on Gmail and YouTube.

According to the report, the ads do not appear to have been purchased from the same group that bought Facebook’s ads, which suggests that there may have been a broader online effort to affect American voters.

After pressure from Congress, both Facebook and Twitter have already turned over information on political ads bought by Russian agencies to investigators, and now it seems that Google may be next. A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that Google is still in the early stages of investigating the ads.

“We have a set of strict ads policies including limits on political ad targeting and prohibitions on targeting based on race and religion,” a Google spokesperson said today. “We are taking a deeper look to investigate attempts to abuse our systems, working with researchers and other companies, and will provide assistance to ongoing inquiries.”

Although Google is now aware of the issue, tracking down Russia-backed ads may not be a straightforward task. Like on Facebook, a large portion of the ads Google sells are purchased through mostly automated systems, and the company does not directly communicate with with every ad buyer.

Google has not said if it will be making any changes to its system in light of its discovery, but Facebook said last month that it has plans to use machine learning to better vet companies who buy ads. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of policy and communications, called it “game of cat and mouse” and said at the time that “bad actors are always working to use more sophisticated methods to obfuscate their origins and cover their tracks.”

Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, so the company has more ad buyers to sift through than anyone, but it is also one of the leading developers of artificial intelligence and machine learning. With the increasing scrutiny on subversive advertising, Google may turn to its vast AI toolset to deal with the problem.

Photo: Google