It’s been in the news that Facebook openly allows political ads to lie, which is appalling. But did you know that while they’ve made some efforts to police specific forms of quackery, there is a thriving market for others?
Even as Facebook has cracked down on anti-vaxxers and peddlers of snake oil cure-alls, a particularly grotesque form of fake cancer treatment has flourished in private groups on Facebook. Black salve, a caustic black paste that eats through flesh, is enthusiastically recommended in dedicated groups as a cure for skin and breast cancer — and for other types of cancer when ingested in pill form. There’s even a group dedicated to applying the paste to pets.
A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that these groups don’t violate its community guidelines. This summer, it launched an initiative to address “exaggerated or sensational health claims” and will downrank that content in the News Feed, similar to how it handles clickbait. But it’s not clear how it defines what a “sensational” health claim is. Citing user privacy, Facebook would not say whether or not it had downranked the black salve groups in the News Feed.
Black salve is truly awful stuff — it’s a corrosive goop that burns away whatever part of your body it touches, and its proponents proudly post grisly photos of holes punched through their bodies or chunks of flesh that have fallen off. They take pride in their self-abuse, and claim it cures just about everything. It’s certainly potent and has demonstrable affects, just like Republicanism, but also likewise is simply universally destructive.
It’s also the case that other social media, like MeWe, are also afflicted with this black salve poison. Shouldn’t they all take action to prevent their platforms from being a place that does harm by spreading bad information?
Another poison marketed as an is MMS, or , which is chlorine dioxide (industrial bleach). Yer supposed to drink the stuff. It’s deadly.
The FDA has advised against it, and it is banned in multiple countries as a . Nonetheless, there are kooks — masquerading as a (presumably tax-free) (of course!), the — based in the States who are promoting this poison world-wide, to offer despite FDA warnings against drinking bleach (“Group to hold event in Washington state in which they peddle a known to be industrial cleaner”). Whilst that article is from April 2019, the kooks have also been active since, e.g., Kenyan government warns public of Miracle Mineral Solutions danger (“As a result of skeptic bloggers, Kenyans are now being warned about the man treating sick people with industrial bleach”).
I help run a local newspaper and it would be impossible to fact check every ad and letter. We leave it up to our readers to respond and point it out.
That’s nice. Do you do something about it when readers point it out? Because facebook doesn’t.
I am not sure why there is a big kerfuffle now about Facebook allowing false political ads. Politicians have lied as long as there have been politicians; political advertising has been around as long as advertising has existed. Numerous Supreme Court decisions exist that basically say, if a newspaper, say, allows any political ads as well, then it is not allowed to pick and choose which ones to allow and which ones to block. I don’t see any reason why Facebook should be different.
Our defense against political lying is a robust journalism and fact checkers. It’s no surprise that our liar-in-chief chooses to make these people his enemies. But to the extent that he is succeeding and eroding peoples’ trust, I think it’s a terrible idea to fall back and hope for Big Tech to save us. Giving the media platforms even more power to control what information people receive sounds like a recipe for further disasters down the road.
Like a lot of alt med cancer treatments, black salve treatment is occasionally fatal.
Not because it itself is fatal, but because it diverts patients away from real medical treatment that works.
Here is one such case reported.
This patient’s survival went from 88% ten year survival to..
2.5% ten year survival.
A superficial stage 1 melanoma ended up being a stage 4 metastatic melanoma.
I don’t want Zuck policing “facts” for me. If we make FB shoulder that responsibility it could create the false impression that we are getting truth.
Twitter’s approach to political ads seems easy: ban them. But, are there ads and other content that aren’t strictly political (“Vote for This”) but lean that way by arguing points of view? I don’t know, but I suspect so, and restricting that could be dicey. You’re not going to stop the RNC from having a FB page where they post opinion pieces that support their platform.
The “let the reader do it” approach would be nice, and should certainly be a component, but readers aren’t any more reliable than FB or Twitter and the paid ads they run.
Another approach is to clearly label ads as paid political cruft. Television started that decades ago…I guess they still do but I don’t watch TV. FB does something like that but users have to bother to click the “i” button.
One final angle might be to provide an affordance from posts on FB et al to fact checking resources, and perhaps even aggregate fact checking scores. Admittedly that’s a stretch.
The problem with platforms banning all political ads is that there may be an increasing number of voters who can only be reached online. Those voters might appreciate the opportunity to live free of political advertising, but is it fair to candidates to essentially block them from contacting these potential supporters?
raven@5–
Thanks for that reference. Fortunately the paper is in an open access journal here. Makes for very interesting reading and not too much dermatological jargon for non-medical readers. Also some grotesque photos.
It amazes me the kind of garbage that gets advertised on FB yet I get banned for a week because I opined that all christians are potentially terrorists when given the proper motivation.
brucegee1962–
That seems perilously close to arguing that political candidates should have the right to force media companies to take their advertising and that consumers of those media companies should be forced to see those ads.
simonhadley–
I’m not supporting your FB ban, but your statement is wrong. There are many historical examples of christians who chose to die rather than commit acts of violence, even in self defence.
Grrr. I’m not that fussed if people want to hurt themselves, but it really irritates me that people torture their pets thus. That does make me quite angry.
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As for the post topic, no, I don’t think there should be any expectation about social media mediating bullshit content when it comes to actual people conversing and sharing beliefs and opinions, but I do think there should be for its other aspects. Thing is, “social media” is a bit of a misnomer, because it’s also used as a news medium and as a business medium and as a political medium.
Meanwhile, Facebook is refusing to run ads for PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylactic, a proven approach to reducing the chance of contracting HIV through casual exposure) because they are “too political.”
Gregory, so? Hardly surprising.
Need it be said that FB is there to make money, nothing more and nothing less?
Obviously, every single decision they make is based on whether it will increase profits or not. Expecting them to be reasonable in any other manner is utter futility.
With respect, it wasn’t all that long ago that that was the only recourse, ineffective or barely-effective as it was.
Today, the barely effective want to trumpet against highly more effective, you’ll just feel like shit and likely, lose hair.
OK, blow off my ball and ass hair off, then my underarms, head and screw it, all of it.
Survival requires fucking hair or something?
Screw survival then!
How key Republicans inside Facebook are shifting its politics to the right (my added emboldening):
And on and on. And on… For instance:
And on:
One key individual in fracebork’s paranoia clique seems to be “Joel Kaplan, vice-president of global public policy at Facebook, [… a] former law clerk to archconservative justice Antonin Scalia on the supreme court”, and an open supporter of Brett Kavanaugh, and apparently also a supporter of Brietbart and Daily Caller.