Meta Allowed Misleading Ads for Bogus Cancer Treatments on Facebook featuring Dr. David Gorski
July 1, 2022
Facebook and its parent company, Meta, don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to combatting online disinformation. At the start of the pandemic, Meta came out publicly against advertisements pedaling questionable health information and things like vaccine misinformation, yet they persist. Advertisements for unproven, debunked, and even harmful cancer treatments continue to appear on Facebook and Instagram, according to a report from MIT Technology Review. The ads still show up on Meta’s social networks in spite of the company policy prohibiting ads that contain misleading health information. A center in Mexico called CHIPSA Hospital, for instance, has several ads in the Meta library referencing “cutting edge” or “breakthrough” treatments, offered exclusively at their facility. Cancer experts told Tech Review that there’s clear reasons these supposed treatments aren’t widely available elsewhere. The treatment is “all nonsense,” according to Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist at Wayne State University.
Read, “Meta Allowed Misleading Ads for Bogus Cancer Treatments on Facebook” from Gizmodo.
