Google’s Martin Splitt confirmed that having a hover over expandable text for navigational elements is not considered cloaking by Google. Martin said doing this is “Deffo not cloaking.”

Kristine Schachinger asked about this on Twitter “if a client wanted to add some text to their menus for clients on user interaction like hover (which means Googlebot would not see it) is that a cloaking issue?”

Here is what this might look like on a page:

Here is that tweet:

Here is the other parts:

So no need to worry about running into a Google Search penalty with this action.

Forum discussion at Twitter.