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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.

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