Two months ago, a sponsored post for a supplement popped up on Facebook with a miraculous claim: “The doctors have been hiding this! Diabetes will disappear in 2 days,” the advertisement boasted, in German. “Finally, I was able to abandon Metformin which I had been taking for five years.” At the bottom of the post, a button directed users to “shop now” for the pills.
This kind of advertisement is not unusual on Facebook, the social media platform, according to a new report published by Reset Tech, a global public policy not-for-profit. Researchers documented hundreds of thousands of similar sponsored posts selling unregulated health products to E.U. users on Facebook between 2023 and 2026. Many of these products, like the one advertised for diabetes, were illegal or had been deemed dangerous by health authorities.
The report found that the accounts publishing those ads were frequently allowed to stay online, pumping out thousands of advertisements for unproven treatments for serious conditions like cancer and hypertension, said Aleksandra Atanasova, an open-source intelligence researcher at Reset Tech who led the project.
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“They are cunningly exploiting pain points in very vulnerable people,” Ms. Atanasova said.
