Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Sensationalized Claims About Bogus 'Miracle Cures' Flourish On Social Media. Now Facebook, Other Sites Are Working To Limit Their Reach.
Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it was taking steps to reduce promotion of products based on misleading health-related claims. In a blog post, the social media company said it had made two updates last month to reduce posts with exaggerated or sensational health claims. (7/2)
Facebook will 鈥渄own-rank鈥 posts that it believes contain health misinformation, meaning those posts will appear in the news feeds of fewer users, and less prominently. The down-ranking will also apply to some posts from Facebook groups devoted to natural treatments, which will show up less often in the news feeds of group members. (Ohlheiser, 7/2)
Alphabet Inc.鈥檚 YouTube has been cutting off advertising for bogus cancer-treatment channels, a spokesman said. It is working with medical doctors to identify content promoting unproven claims and medical conspiracy theories and has tweaked its algorithms to reduce the number of times these dubious videos are presented to users. Facebook and YouTube detailed their recent actions on cancer-related content after the Journal presented them with its findings. Widespread misinformation sometimes appeared alongside ads, videos or pages for proven treatments, the Journal found. (Hernandez and McMillan, 7/2)
Facebook's update does not explicitly mention what it is doing about groups dedicating to promoting "exaggerated or sensational health claims." Most of the announcement focuses on down-ranking posts in the News Feed and predicts some pages will be affected. (Birnbaum, 7/2)
Tech companies are increasingly trying to battle a proliferation of dubious health-related content on their sites, and are also aggressively trying to weed out hate speech and political misinformation. (Schuetz, 7/2)
In other health and technology news 鈥
No one really knew what digital therapeutics were 10 years ago. Today, there鈥檚 still no good definition. At its simplest, the field includes apps intended to be used like medicine or even with medicine 鈥 think of the ovulation-tracking app that was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for contraception, or the apps that work with sensors stuck on pills or in blood glucose readers. The field also includes video games and apps designed to replicate well-established mental health therapies. (Sheridan, 7/3)
