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Peddlers of Medical Misinformation Are Using Social Media 'Censorship' as a Selling Point
Speech OnlineSpeech OnlineThis week, we're looking at the state of free speech on the internet, how we got here, and where we're going.
No one has ever accused Mike Adams, the self-proclaimed Health Ranger, of being an understated guy, but recent events have taken him to new, shouty heights. After Adams' website, Natural News, had its page suspended by Facebook in June for violating the company's spam policies, Adams likened the suspension to genocide and said President Trump should use the military, if necessary, to break up tech companies. But Adams—and other peddlers of medical misinformation, including many anti-vaccine personalities—are also working hard to make their supposed muzzling by social media companies into a selling point and a profit-driver.
In an email blast on June 30, Adams accused Google of gaming search results to "to defame and attack all natural health topics, all while banning natural health websites from its search results." He added that the search engine giant "has gone all-in with Monsanto, Big Pharma, chemotherapy, pesticides, 5G, geoengineering, fluoride and every other poison you can imagine."
And then, naturally, he turned around and offered to sell his audience the supplements So Powerful That Google Is Trying to Hide Them (emphasis his):
P.S. Despite Google's malicious attacks on health and nutrition, the truth is that nutritional supplements works. For the next day or so, we've got an event running on PQQ, CoQ10 and other specialty supplements that dramatically increase your intake of cell-supporting nutrients (including brain-supporting nutrients). Check out the details here.
It is emblematic of the strange moment we've arrived at in the selling of misinformation online, particularly the medical variety. In recent months, several social media giants have announced their intention to crack down on that misinformation, including most particularly anti-vaccine content. (Pinterest made the "vaccine" hashtag literally impossible to search for since virtually every search resultshowed up anti-vax content.)
But the process has been late, slow, and inconsistent. Take Instagram, which banned some anti-vaccine hashtags in March, but left others alone. Today, some of those banned hashtags, like #vaccineskill, have made a noticeable comeback, and there are anti-vaccine accounts aplenty, including Vaccine Truth,which has 60,000 followers. Or take the lively world of fake cancer cures: theWall Street Journalrecently noted that YouTube and Facebook are still overrun with the same fake cancer treatments that have been circulating online for years. That includes black salve, a longtime faux treatment for skin cancer that in actuality just burns skin away without killing cancer growths, and the entire opus of Robert O. Young, who promotes things like juicing regimens and "alkaline infusions" to cure cancer, infusions that critics say are functionally just injections of a baking soda cocktail. Young went to prison in 2017 for practicing medicine without a license, and he was ordered to pay over $100 million in a civil lawsuit filed against him by a terminal cancer patient who'd used his treatments the following year. Yet he's back on Facebook and busily selling his products through a network of interconnected pages.
In other words, the social media companies' supposed "crackdown" has been bizarre, partial, and in some cases, not permanent. The entire muddled process has certainly complicated business for people who make a living selling misinformation. But it's also given them a recognizable new selling point, a way to claim to the audience they still very much have on these same social media platforms that their ideas simply must work, which is why Big Government and Big Pharma are trying to muzzle them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Wednesday July 17 2019, @12:25PM (2 children)
This sort of information largely isn't even illegal. At least in so far as it's not illegal to lie. Which is why you very rarely ever see these peddlers of Supplements, Complementary, and Alternative medicine (S.C.A.M.) so bold as to ever mention outright that they can do something really specific and objectively verifiable like "cure cancer", instead they say something nebulous like "helps boost the immune system" or other similar fluff that's supposed to make someone without a sceptical frame of mind to think that their nostrum or therapy or whatever actually does something medically useful. They almost always have that infamous Quack Miranda Warning [scienceblogs.com]:
in fine print somewhere. I'm sorry, but I've lost one parent dead to cancer and have the other with permanent brain damage from a stroke because they both credulously believed in this S.C.A.M. stuff instead of real medicine. Anything that can prevent these peddlers of lies and snake oil from getting higher profiles is a good thing I think.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:37PM (1 child)
I'm sorry, but I've lost one parent dead to cancer and have the other with permanent brain damage from a stroke because they both credulously believed in this S.C.A.M. stuff instead of real medicine. Anything that can prevent these peddlers of lies and snake oil from getting higher profiles is a good thing I think.
I'm sorry to read you lost your parents to cancer. I was diagnosed with stage-IV colon cancer 6 years ago, given a 10% change to survive at the time. Once it spread all four lobes of my lungs 3 years ago, I was given 2-6 months to live. Over these six year, and particularly during the last 3 after which I was expected to be dead, I found a lot of holistic crap and nonsense being touted as effective cancer "cures." Ironically, my oncologist turned me onto the least likely-sounding thing of all--high THC cannabis oil of all things (google Rick Simpson Oil if you're interested)--which I almost didn't try EVEN THOUGH MY DOCTOR told me about other patients that had successfully used it. That's how incredulous I was, and it was only when my wife begged me to to try it that I relented.
I did not think it would work any better than any of the nonsense "cures" being bandied about, but I figured my wife would be less stressed if I just did it anyway, and at least with all that THC in my system I would die with relatively little pain (or even awareness, if I was lucky).
Six months later instead of being dead I was in complete remission and back at work, and I've been healthy ever since. I can't say it was an enjoyable experience--it turns out that the thing that kills the cancer is the very thing that makes you high, and being stoned 20 hours/day for months on end is a miserable experience (though a cakewalk compared to chemo).
In any event, there are some real diamonds among all the shit, and I was lucky enough to have an Oncologist who risked their job to point me in the right direction (they are contractually obligated to never mention any possible treatments other than surgery, radiation, chemo, and hospital-approved studies, even for things they know work, and even when the hospital itself is observing shocking curative results in their palliative care for people using medical marijuana, go figure).
This problem is made more difficult by an FDA that will not allow any significant studies on medical cannabis, particularly studies that might threaten a multi-trillion dollar chemo industry, and herein lies the real problem. We need scientific studies for this, and while there are thousands of people who have survived late-stage, normally survivable cancers thanks to RSO, myself included, that is still no substitute for proper, double-blind studies if you want to (a) verify the medicine works and (b) see it adopted and used by millions of others who would benefit, and aren't willing, or desperate enough, to step outside of the bounds of orthodoxy to try things out (and most of those who are, will try things that don't work because how, without good scientific studies, is anyone going to tell on their own?). There are hints (studies in Israel for example, where they've actually moved past proving Rick Simpson Oil works and are now trying to determine which strains are best suited for fighting which cancers), but when your own government blocks such studies, finding these sorts of things can be very difficult.
And herein lies the rub. The anti-vaxxers and other shills exploit a very real problem in order to legitimize their scams: industry capture of regulatory boards and suppression of scientific inquiry for political, religious, or industry-supporting purposes. They can do this very effectively because the problem is real, and real solutions are being deliberately buried for financial or political gain along with all of the dangerous crap.
It's a hard problem to solve, because you can lose a lot of good information along with the bad, and censorship is a slippery slope. On the other hand, there is a need for curated information, and for not having demonstrably nonsensical crap filter to the top of search results. There are no easy answers to this, and absolutist positions such as "it's a business, the can do what they like!" or "any censorship is bad, let people figure it out for themselves!" are both dangerous over-simplifications of a very nuanced and complex problem, the solution to which (if one exists) will likely have to be just as nuanced and almost certainly lies somewhere between these two ends of the spectrum. A good start might be eliminating regulatory capture of our government agencies and returning them to a state of reliable neutrality, and not allowing them to block studies like this, but even so, that merely addresses one problem, and still sidesteps the underlying complexity of sorting through information and misinformation, and striking a good balance between curation and "censorship."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:44PM
sigh, that should read "normally UNsurvivable cancers"--where's the edit button when you need it.