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upstart writes:

Clinics offering debunked cancer treatments are still allowed to advertise, despite the company's stated efforts to control medical misinformation:

The ad reads like an offer of salvation: Cancer kills many people. But there is hope in Apatone, a proprietary vitamin C–based mixture, that is "KILLING cancer." The substance, an unproven treatment that is not approved by the FDA, is not available in the United States. If you want Apatone, the ad suggests, you need to travel to a clinic in Mexico.

If you're on Facebook or Instagram and Meta has determined you may be interested in cancer treatments, it's possible you've seen this ad, or one of the 20 or so others recently running from the CHIPSA hospital in Mexico near the US border, all of which are publicly listed in Meta's Ad Library. They are part of a pattern on Facebook of ads that make misleading or false health claims, targeted at cancer patients.

Evidence from Facebook and Instagram users, medical researchers, and its own Ad Library suggests that Meta is rife with ads containing sensational health claims, which the company directly profits from. The misleading ads may remain unchallenged for months and even years. Some of the ads reviewed by MIT Technology Review promoted treatments that have been proved to cause acute physical harm in some cases. Other ads pointed users toward highly expensive treatments with dubious outcomes.

[...] Gorski is blunt about his view on whether Facebook will effectively address cancer misinformation: "The only real way to combat such misinformation on Facebook would require an army of fact checkers that Facebook is never going to pay for, given its past record even on covid-19 misinformation and dangerous political conspiracy theories."

And as the University of Washington's Moran points out, misinformation like this rarely stays confined to the platform where it's originally posted. While Facebook plays a key role in getting sensational claims about dubious cancer treatments in front of desperate patients, the groups and ads carrying those claims often link to other sites and networks that reinforce them.

[...] "Especially when you are experiencing a medical crisis, you are looking at an incredible amount of information," Moran says. "It seems good to you that you are doing your research, you're going from one site to the next. But they all belong to the same ecosystem."

Original Submission

1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
2. "Clinics offering debunked cancer treatments are still allowed to advertise, despite the company's stated efforts to control medical misinformation" - https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/27/1054784/facebook-meta-cancer-treatment-ads-misinformation/
3. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=55779

printed from SoylentNews, Facebook is Bombarding Cancer Patients With Ads for Unproven Treatments on 2024-05-13 18:19:35