Fake News Goes Non-political

Not too long ago, when you heard the expression “fake news” the assumption was that the speaker was talking about politics. That seems not to be the case any more.

This thought struck me as I came across a story on the fastcompany.com website with the headline: “Facebook deletes alternative health pages as the war on fake news escalates.”

The move began in the spring of this year, but few noticed except the advertisers who were suddenly being blocked. It appears that Facebook views several of the promoters offering alternative or holistic medicine as purveyors of pseudoscience, declaring them possibly as big a danger to the public as election tampering. “This includes rather large accounts focused on health, natural remedies, and organic living, such as Just Natural Medicine (1 million followers), Natural Cures Not Medicine (2.3 million followers), and People’s Awakening (3.6 million followers). Small accounts with under 15,000 followers were also hit.” Another affected company was Conscious Life News with 1.1 million followers.

The article goes on to say that these and similar complementary and alternative health pages “have been known to spread misleading or false information about medicinal remedies that are not backed by traditional science, or debate issues like vaccination.”

The subject of vaccinations is of particular interest for two reasons. First, Russian bots have been targeting both pro- and anti-vaccination advocates with on-line posts in an attempt to stir up controversy and conflict. Second, the recent increase in outbreaks of measles, mumps, and pertussis among unvaccinated children has “increased mortality from vaccine preventable diseases.”

But this brings up a couple of interesting questions. Why is it Facebook’s job to police all the false information on their pages? And, shouldn’t people be able to figure out for themselves whether their choice of medicine is effective or not?

Neither has an easy answer. Facebook has passed the point where they can declare themselves a communications medium, not responsible for content. The phone companies aren’t held responsible for what you say to a friend, but they also don’t run advertising during your conversation or otherwise try to influence you. That leaves Facebook in an awkward position.

According to the numbers shown above, millions of people are looking for magic answers in the areas of health and wellness. Many don’t care what science says and don’t make good choices.

Over the past three weeks I have seen numerous reports such as these:

• A doctor placed on probation by the Medical Board of California for four years even though she “received testimonials from celebrity patients…and has promoted [her questionable therapy] on the Oprah Winfrey Network.” Unfortunately celebrity testimonials are not the same as scientific evidence. 
• Crowd funding for patients to receive dubious cancer treatments with much fanfare, although after treatment “many publicized success stories have a tragic ending,” a fact that  is not widely publicized.
• After Federal Trade Commission (FTC) action, an intravenous vitamin cocktail marketer agrees to stop making deceptive health claims.
• The Texas Medical board required a promoter of the multiple chemical sensitivity concept “to revise the form he used to obtain consent to treat patients with injections of environmental substances. The form was required to state that (a) his injections contain only the ‘electromagnetic imprint’ of the agents in question, (b) the therapy is not FDA-approved, and (c) the therapeutic value of the therapy is disputed.”

See several more examples from this RAS post in June 2016.

I have argued in the past against too much consumer protection. Let people make informed choices. But the information above shows that some promoters, even medical doctors, will get away with as much as they can to dupe patients into undergoing unproven treatments until a medical board or the FTC is forced to step in.

Critical thinking should at least make everyone wary enough to shun those who try to avoid legal problems by burying wording in the fine print, “Not approved by the FDA and not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or any other medical condition.” But even with the help of Facebook, people looking for easy answers and who don't care about science will still be at the mercy of liars and charlatans.