Facebook is Bombarding Cancer Patients With Ads For Unproven Treatments (technologyreview.com) 81
Clinics offering debunked cancer treatments are still allowed to advertise, despite the company's stated efforts to control medical misinformation. From a report: 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.
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.
stay classy (Score:2)
Always keeping things classy over there at Facebook. Mark seems like such a great guy.
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> blaming Facebook is akin to blaming the road for shitty drivers
I'm pretty sure that the DMV is to blame for shitty drivers. The bar is very low.
Most profitable scam of the day? (Score:2)
Not a terrible FP, though I don't like the vacuous Subject. Most people composing their replies don't even consider the Subject and whether it has any relevance to whatever they are trying to say... Ergo, vacuous Subjects often endure long after any pretense of relevance has lapsed.
Since I'm not most people, I try to remember to consider what I want to say AND the Subject that might accurately describe it.
However, as regards the substance of the FP, I don't think it's a matter of "classy", though I agree sc
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Possibly they straddle the line between scams and true believers, which covers most alternative medical treatments. Mexico has looser medical regulations, so it's the go-to place for procedures or medicine not approved by the FDA. And many there don't start with the intent to scam people, but it grows that way over time. One day someone says "can you provide my new medicine to a patient?" and the doctor agrees; in the case of some treatments that original doctor went from a tiny practice to one that's boom
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Sounds to me like you are just trying to define the characteristics of scammers that are most suitable for the scammers who are running this particular kind of scam.
My take is that abusing vulnerable and weak people is bad. Period. I don't care how sincere the scammer is, though there are some scams where the scammers' sincerity counts for more than in other scams.
(The main alternative category that comes to mind involves "cooperative" scams, where the victim thinks he's the one who's scamming someone else.
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And this is surprising
easy 3 step process (Score:5, Insightful)
Step two: Enforce "truth in advertising" laws currently on the books. https://www.ftc.gov/news-event... [ftc.gov]
Step three: fine the shit out of FB, increasing by an order of magnitude, every time they break step 2.
Re:easy 3 step process [to get true ads] (Score:2)
I can't decide if you're feeding a troll or if you tripped on Poe's Law.
Also can't decide what the actual Subject is supposed to be. If my guess about "true ads" is close, then there's an obvious economic problem there.
The costs for producing quality go up as you approach "best".
Much cheaper to make products (and services) that are "good enough" and then use ads to inflate the perceived value.
Therefore the best ad is clearly the one that makes a terrible and cheaply produced product seem to be the best. And
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Re:easy 3 step process (Score:4, Informative)
prefrontal cortex
by estimates this does not start to occur until at the earliest 5 months after conception, to say nothing about when a fetus has anything close to approximating a concious experience
Being able to feel pain
even this isn't quantifiable or provable but even then it would be predicated on the life having a developed mind enought to have a concious experience enough to perceive that pain as we as adolescant or grown humans do. Lot's of things feel pain but we don't offer them moral consideration, much less legal protections.
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by estimates this does not start to occur until at the earliest 5 months after conception, to say nothing about when a fetus has anything close to approximating a conscious experience
There are studies that say we don't really know when a human starts feeling pain Reconsidering fetal pain [bmj.com]. My personal opinions on the subject don't matter much, but I feel like you err on the side of caution when it comes to subjecting humans to painful deaths.
even this isn't quantifiable or provable but even then it would be predicated on the life having a developed mind enough to have a conscious experience enough to perceive that pain as we as adolescent or grown humans do. Lot's of things feel pain but we don't offer them moral consideration, much less legal protections.
Again, my opinion is all I can speak to when it comes to which species get human level protections of life, but I'd limit the protection to just humans.
Without extra human intervention, the fetus would develop into a human with the capacity for human
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Interesting study but by their own admission its something that can never be proven, much less are they equating it to pain of a concious human with a fully developed brain function, much less anything approximating pain response in even animals at the 24 week mark. Not enough, not even anywhere close enough for a ban on abortion, not with the total amount of ethical and legal quadries it presents.
Look I feel you on all that, I do but "an honest conversation" at this point is off the cards and I put a majo
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The road to legal abortion (there are no laws, a human is human at birth) started here in Canada with Dr Henry Morgentalor getting up and describing what women were going through in the alleys to get an abortion, which led to jury nullification, the government playing double jeopardy to convict, the people getting mad at double jeopardy, more jury nullification and eventually rights (Security of Person) spelled out in the Constitution that led to abortion laws getting thrown out. (Double jeopardy too)
The im
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So the morning after pill, why ban that? Certainly no prefontal cortex there. You don't even have neurons until 5 weeks. And no prefrontal cortex in the first trimester. Why why the emphasis to ban abortion from the moment of conception? This is a religious view only, not a scientific one, and not even a religious view that is upheld in most traditional religious scriptures.
Re: easy 3 step process (Score:2)
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1st amendment and the right to belong to a religion that kills babies routinely like 3 or 4 Supreme Court Justices. Why do you think they want more babies? They're fun to abuse and kill.
Don't know why you think BLM would be happy about their children getting abused and killed, many want to avoid it and would prefer access to cheap effective contraception, which it seems is likely on the chopping block too, gotta have more children to abuse and a big government to monitor peoples bedrooms
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Don't worry, I'm sure the government can manage to fuck up more than one thing at a time.
Re:easy 3 step process (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's way, way easier to fuck with the rights of people who can't defend themselves than with the rights of corporations with more money than the deity of your choice.
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Also it is apparently vastly easier to really support for the rights of an unborn person than to get people to care about those rights after birth.
Shoot someone who knocked at your door in self defense? Allowed.
Prevent your child from getting life saving medicine because you think prayer is better? Allowed.
Abortion to save a mother's life? Not allowed!!
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The legislative moves away from being rooted in reality and towards how the laws make the population feel.
Re:easy 3 step process (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of this is just bad AI. And the media hype around AI is such that so many companies want it, despite all the screw ups. Essentially, too much work needs to be done which impacts profits if you have real people involved in curating ads and news. So you get artificial-so-called-intelligence. It scans things and is dumb, hastily implemented, and tested on customers.
The business model is to accept any and all ads; this is not like the old days of advertisement supported broadcast tv where you had curated ads.
"If customer has condition X then present ads that offer a solution to X, repeat until customer demographics change and start presenting ads for hospice and funeral homes."
The AI can't tell fraud from experimental, or experimental from agency approved. Remember, even Steve Jobs fell for the alternative cures fraud. The fraud is rampant, and somewhat obvious to spot to a human with only small bit of knowledge on the subject of how to spot fakery. Remember the whole Laetrile fraud which peaked in the 70s with congressional hearings, but who's practicioners just moved on to other diseases to be cured and those clinics just across the border in Mexico still do business with new and unproven quack cancer cures.
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I would like to offer you one of my "Words Mean Things" awards. I give this non-existent award to fellow posters who find it necessary to maintain clear communication by refusing to allow long-established meanings to be diluted by trendy use. Your example: Misinformation vs. Lying.
Lying carries with it knowledge of the truth and the choice to provide false information regardless. "I knew the truth and lied anyway."
Misinforming is ambiguous regarding truth and is only specific to the falsehood of the stateme
A special place in hell (Score:3)
Capitalism does not care about laws (Score:3, Insightful)
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What are you 12?
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Free citizens of a free country ought to be able to peddle — and buy — whatever they please.
We tried that, and unscrupulous people developed things like patent medicines which caused all sorts of pain and suffering to a whole lot of people, including addiction and death.
What we did, as free citizens of a free country was to demand that products that claimed to be medicines actually did what the manufacturers claimed they did, and this has worked pretty well over the past century or so.
If you want to live in a place with no government oversight of any aspect of your life, may I suggest Somalia?
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This outcome — even if it really happened as you describe — does not justify removing freedoms.
I know, I know, like that opioid crisis we just had [hhs.gov], right? Oh, wait...
No, you Statist. The responsibility of for avoiding "addictions and the deaths" are ultimately on the consumer. We can pay someone to do the testing for us
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You should read this, then tell me all about how they're not true Scotsmen. [publicaffairsbooks.com]
In the meantime the rest of us will go about our lives, secure in the knowledge that when we buy lunch the cafe will have been inspected by the health inspector at some point and we won't get food poisoning.
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Free citizens of a free country ought to be able to peddle — and buy — whatever they please.
Your narrow view of "freedom" condones slavery and all kind of child abuse. No thank you. In fact ill fight tooth and nail to make sure your version of "freedom" never exists.
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This does not follow from anything I said.
Now that's insurgent talk — I'll be sure to smash out those teeth, and rip out those nails, should we ever meet, laughing out loud.
No Collectivist asshole should survive an attempt to destroy yet another reasonably free country.
The Cancer Act (Score:5, Informative)
Every country needs something similar though arguably it should cover every cure chronic, contagious or terminal disease and the penalties should extend to any platform that hosts that content. And as a side effect it would also stop pharmaceutical companies from trying to pitch treatments to the general public too.
T-shirts? (Score:2)
Re:It worked for COVID-19 "vaccines" (Score:5, Insightful)
When these cancer "treatments" go through full FDA approvals, 3 phase clinical trials on the scale of tens of thousands of participants and several other RCT studies, the you can make that argument.
Re:It worked for COVID-19 "vaccines" (Score:5, Informative)
lol this is C- grade trolling, you're supposed to try and mask the disengousness, not just admit you don't have a serious argument.
Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine [nejm.org]
Efficacy of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine at Completion of Blinded Phase [nejm.org]
Is it still early 2021? You folks were supposed to mad about mandates, you lost the efficacy and safety argument a long time ago.
I am sure all the vaccinated people will start dropping dead at year 4 or 5 like as predicted. Keep the dream alive.
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lol try again and maybe look up what in fact a phase 3 trial is. also by the fact that it's called "phase 3" should provide a hint that there are 2 preceding trials. In fact the first test doses of the vaccine were given in May 2020
https://www.pfizer.com/news/pr... [pfizer.com]
"The Phase 3 clinical trial was designed to determine if the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective in preventing COVID-19 disease. This trial began July 27, 2020 and completed enrollment of 46,331 participants in January 2021. O
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Hey, we all died last year because of the vaccination.
The tinfoil headed idiots are still around because someone decided we'd go to hell...
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Head, meet tinfoil.
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The difference, you fucking retard, is that the vaccines actually worked.
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Because they did not work
"One dose is not as effective as multiples so it doesn't work at all. I understand immunology"
Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule [cdc.gov]
For all I know, those "cancer treatments" may have "worked" — for someone — too. Certainly so for some alternative meanings of the terms "treatment" and "worked".
Man, if only all those researchers and doctors had some sort of method to prove which treatments are actually effective and a consensus definition for if something is effective. Maybe some sort of study or trial where they administer the treament and control for the conditions. One day we will get there.
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They weren't even vaccines
The "they changed the definition of vaccines" is the most pointless argument against the COVID vax on the planet. That's how science works, you learn new things, and you adjust prior documentation to reflect new knowledge. They found a new way to incite a desired immune response, just like a vaccine does. What's the problem with that?
Because they did not work
So your support for "they don't work" is an article about booster shots? I don't follow. By that logic pretty much every vaccine we've ever developed "doesn't work".
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The term was not redefined. Many vaccines don't provide sterilising immunity, and this has always been the case. They clarified the term to make it clear that people who were prying at the wording to push misinformation were wrong.
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Yes, it was [newswest9.com]. Stop the gaslighting. You can argue, the change was immaterial, or normal, but you cannot claim, there was no change — facts don't work that way.
And now you're admitting the truth. Usually it takes several posts for your kind to contradict yourself. Thank you for shortening that circle to the minimum possible.
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There was not a change. They clarified the wording without actually changing the meaning, because some people were willfully misinterpreting the old wording.
Only some vaccines have ever provided sterilising immunity. Many did not.
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If you're not a troll, then I honestly feel somewhat sorry for you.
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Then maybe Facebook should be held reponsible for the ads they show. Just like in the past it was the same for all other media.
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Then maybe Facebook should be held reponsible for the ads they show. Just like in the past it was the same for all other media.
Agreed. Humans are putting in time to create the ads and companies are collecting money for their display. I'm not sure how it became acceptable that otherwise reputable websites can show unbelievably scammy ads.
Make websites liable for scam ads they show, they'll quickly demand the ad sellers give them good legit ads (and that they accept the liability for bad ones) and the problem goes away.
It's because they're lazy (Score:2)
The problem I see is that the ad sellers want to be incredibly lazy. In the old days, to buy TV ad time, for example, or even a radio ad, you had to reach out to a person, get the rates, negotiate a contract, etc... This allowed the companies to vet the ads.
These days, you create an account and "purchase" so many impressions. They don't have a person vetting what you're showing. Even if it has code that could be malicious. In some cases you can even change the image after the fact, without review. Bec
Yep. (Score:1)
Dr. OZ is at it again. (Score:2)
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So (Score:2)
This is minor compared to the megadeaths caused as the decades drag on with business-unfriendly regulations plaguing drug development.
But you know, a few deaths in front of the camera outweigh millions dead because drugs are released years later than they otherwise would be.
This compounds like interest, year after year. The delta in deaths due to tech lagging by months, then years, then decades now, is many magnitudes more than deaths due to unsafe drugs getting to marked too quickly, before a problem is r
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This is minor compared to the megadeaths caused as the decades drag on with business-unfriendly regulations plaguing drug development.
Ah yes, it's business friendliness we need in drug regulations, not maximising patient outcomes.
But you know, a few deaths in front of the camera outweigh millions dead because drugs are released years later than they otherwise would be.
Yeah because there's no way companies would sell useless or outright lethal things got profit if they got a free pass on the consequences.
How to sink to an even lower low (Score:2)
Not content with coming within a hair's breadth of ending American democracy, Metastabook now casts about for some way to sink to an even lower low.
Wait⦠(Score:2)
Facebook ... (Score:2)
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Mark's homeopathic medicine is making it worse.
I'm shocked, I'll say. Shocked. (Score:2)
I'm shocked, I'll say. Shocked.
Zucked again! (Score:1)