Clickbait Cures:

How Meta and Google Tolerate a Dubious Meds Market in the EU

Executive Summary

Meta and Google are hosting ads promoting questionable health products across Europe. Our research has uncovered a long-running campaign that uses fake endorsements from actual doctors to sell unverified supplements. These ads deceive users with false claims, images of real doctors, and fabricated websites. They also violate platform policies; Meta and Google remove the ads but allow the accounts behind them to remain mostly active. This investigation shows that these platforms’ actions are insufficient to stop the misleading campaigns, highlighting the need for stronger rules and accountability.

Key Takeaways:

• The campaign has been running for at least two years; our team has been tracking it closely for the past 11 months. The promotion runs through Facebook ads, Google ads, networks of interconnected websites targeting EU countries, and YouTube channels promoting the websites organically.
• Over 35,000 Facebook ads have been promoted by 1,500 pages, most of which are anonymous assets used solely for advertising.
• Hundreds of Google ads have been identified, and over 80 medical supplements have been promoted. These figures are likely much higher.
• The ads feature images of real individuals—primarily well-known medical doctors or celebrities—falsely endorsing dubious drugs available only online. They also feature the logos of well-known pharmaceutical companies in potential violation of intellectual property laws.
• Other campaign tactics include website spoofing, clickbait, fake patient reviews, and search engine optimization (SEO) boosts.
• The campaign shares tactics with known pro-Kremlin operations, such as Doppelganger. Networks of Facebook advertisers active on Doppelganger have been running ads promoting the dubious supplements. The campaign also uses tactics and assets that are common to other scam campaigns, such as Facebook Hustlers.
• Meta’s response to the campaign is to remove the ads from the Ad Library while keeping the advertiser pages active, allowing these pages to run new ads from the campaign at any time. Deleting the ads also hampers research into the scope of the entire campaign. Meta currently does not disclose the budgets of these ads in the EU.
• The existence of such a campaign on Meta violates the platform’s policy on Fraud, Scam, and Deceptive Practices regarding advertising misleading health practices, including the promotion of cures for specific diseases (e.g., diabetes), as well as using “sensationalist content […] and clickbait tactics to make exaggerated or extreme health claims.”
• Google’s Ad Transparency Center makes identifying ads from this campaign challenging because it still lacks a keyword search function. Like Meta, Google also removes ads from this campaign, leaving advertisers active.

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