Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook and its parent company Meta vowed to do a better job cracking down on medical misinformation on the platform. However, according to a report this week in the MIT Technology Review, many cancer patients are still being targeted with dangerous and misleading ads for treatment.

According to the report, a hospital network over the border in Mexico is running ads in the U.S. touting cancer cures that have not been approved by the FDA. Experts say that the treatments being advertised are useless at best and could cause serious health problems at worst. However, some experts are also skeptical that the social media giant will make the investment needed to truly address this problem.

“The only real way to combat such misinformation on Facebook would require an army of fact checkers that Facebook is never going to pay for, given its past record even on covid-19 misinformation and dangerous political conspiracy theories,” surgical oncologist and science editor David Gorski told the MIT Technology Review.

Some cancer patients say they are “bombarded” with ads like this, so it’s clear that this problem isn’t unique to one shady group in Mexico. That means Facebook needs to do a far better job detecting and removing these ads before they fool any more users.

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