Facebook bombarded cancer patients with ads for unproven treatments

There’s one misinformation sphere I’ve returned to a few times as a reporter: promises of miracle cancer “cures” targeting patients at their most vulnerable, via social media ads, online support groups, and recommendation algorithms. A couple of years before Covid-19, I wrote a feature story tracing the paths that these bogus claims take to reach cancer patients and their families online. That story prompted Facebook to change how they approach moderating some forms of health misinformation — a change that, the pandemic would demonstrate pretty clearly, wasn’t really enough to stop the spread of these claims.

In the summer of 2022, I returned to this topic, and found that Facebook is still making money from ads targeting cancer patients with promises of natural cancer treatments at expensive international clinics. Here’s a bit from that story:

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. 

CHIPSA, which stands for Centro Hospitalario Internacional del Pacifico, S.A, was founded in 1979 and refers to itself as a community hospital offering integrative treatments for cancer. On Facebook, the facility describes itself as being at the “cutting edge” of cancer research. But the hospital’s foundational diet-based therapy, called the Gerson Protocol, is “all nonsense,” says David Gorski, a surgical oncologist at Wayne State University in Michigan and the managing editor of the website Science-Based Medicine. Developed by a German doctor in the 1920s to treat migraines, the regimen consists of a special diet and frequent “detox” procedures. It has been discredited for decades in the medical community.

[Read more at Technology Review]