INVESTIGATIONS

INVESTIGATION…‘I cured thousands of cancer patients’: How Facebook allows spread of health misinformation with digital ads

Meta, owner of Facebook, is allowing health misinformation and disinformation to run freely on its platform, an investigation has revealed.

The company publicly commits to fighting misinformation and disinformation around the world, but an analysis conducted on some pages on the platform has documented how a huge health misinformation campaign runs on the Facebook platform, being aided by a massive digital advertising system.

This report unravels the prevalent use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-manipulated content and cloned voices to spread the efficacy of uncertified drugs on the platform.

Platforms use meta advertisements as a key component of their Facebook marketing strategy to reach a large audience. They make their information available to a larger audience through the channel.

Platforms use meta advertisements as a key component of their Facebook marketing strategy to reach a large audience. They make their information available to a larger audience through the channel.

We found two pages, Laut Products and Eco Puzzling, advertising cures for diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, and joint pains on the Facebook platform.

The two pages appeared to be managed by the same set of people based on the posts pinned to their timelines and the websites that served as landing pages for their sponsored content.

Viewers were advised to click on the call to action button on the sponsored posts (videos), and doing this would take them to websites advertising cures for a variety of diseases.

Our analysis of the Facebook ad libraries on the two pages revealed that the sponsored posts targeted Facebook users in Bangladesh, India, Austria, and Nigeria. Of all the countries, India was found to have the most sponsored posts.

The two pages’ sponsored posts generated millions of views and thousands of comments. Five sponsored posts were discovered on Eco Puzzling, uploaded in German, targeting Austrian Facebook users.

Several pages employed the same tactics as Laut Products and Eco Puzzling pages. They used videos to advertise cures for different diseases, one of which boasted to have cured cancer.

The pages were observed to have been created in January, April, May, and June 2024, deploying the same strategies as Laut Product and Eco Puzzling to promote their messages that they had permanent cures for various diseases.

They also used celebrities to promote their messages. The purpose of using celebrities and professionals to promote the blogs and videos was to give the impression that the items, blogs, and videos were credible.

Additionally, we saw that the pages made extensive use of reputable news platforms’ logos and text styles, including those of Channels Television, Arise TV, Al Jazeera, the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), NBC, BBC, and TV Continental.

AI-generated male and female voices were featured in the videos. Each video employed the same tactics, claiming that the government, medical professionals, and pharmacies were keeping the medications hidden to prevent the public from having access to them so they would not be cured.

Several sponsored posts we came across between December 2023 and June 2024 suggested that Meta’s failure to stop sponsored posts that appeared to violate its rules was a long-standing and ongoing problem.

These pages were taking advantage of people’s frantic search for medications that could help them, as the cost of pharmaceutical drugs are rising beyond the means of most Nigerians due to a galloping inflation.

At the time of this publication, Meta had not responded to detailed questions sent on June 27, 2024, about the activities of the pages on which digitally manipulated posts to mislead users published on Facebook were promoted on Meta Ads Manager.

In one example, Facebook allowed the Laut Product page to sponsor a post in 2023 targeting Nigerian users in which a purported Nigerian doctor named Dr. Rashad Dacus had invented a remedy for joint pains.

The new remedy, according to the video, was designed to solve 100 percent of orthopedic problems, including polyarthritis, osteoarthritis, and osteoporosis.

The video featured Folly Bah of Al Jazeera presenting for 15 seconds in a blue background on
Channels TV “News at Ten” with the headline of a new method of treating diseased joints.

After initial 15 seconds, another video featured a male doctor in a lab coat standing in an environment believed to be a hospital, aiming to enhance the credibility of the video’s content.

We conducted an image search on a screenshot captured from the video using Pimeye on the male doctor and found that he was Dr. Antonio J. Webb, a spine surgeon based in San Antonio, United States.

A further search revealed that the part of him appearing on the Laut Product video was cut from a three-minute, 20-second YouTube video uploaded by Webb on his YouTube page about anterior lumbar interbody fusion in 2022.

The male voice in the video urged viewers to click on the website link provided on the call-to-action button to learn more information about the medication. When we clicked on the URL, it led to a scanty website advertising selling a remedy for joint discomfort.

One of the pages we came across during our investigation into Laut Products and Eco Puzzling was Family Tree. The page was also found to have sponsored the same video on January 7, 2024, to a website (archived here) advertising and selling a remedy named Stallion Pain Crusher for joint discomfort.

The second video we found Laut Products had promoted, targeting Nigerian Facebook users, featured a journalist standing with a group of people who appeared to be demonstrators while donning a helmet and protective vest.

The voice in the video alleged the journalist was reporting a protest of hypertensive patients demonstrating against the government for withholding a medication that might help alleviate the disease in a day.

Yet another scene appeared wherein a doctor’s face, said to be Dr. Junadis, surfaced and seemed to be speaking.

The doctor said he had developed a drug that could stabilise blood pressure and bring it back to normal in 24 hours with just one round of treatment.

We conducted a reverse image search using Yandex on a screenshot of the journalist captured in the video and found that the journalist was Mayeni Jones, a BBC journalist. The part of the video where she appeared was taken from a broadcast clip that BBC News (1:10pm to 1:30pm) made after protesters of police brutality in Nigeria were confronted by members of the Nigerian Armed Forces at Lekki Tollgate in Lagos in October 2020 (the #EndSARS demonstration).

An analysis of the video also showed that the lip movements of the two speakers in the video did not align with what was being said, which was unusual for a normal video. The video, as usual,encouraged viewers to click on the link on the post, which would lead to a website with an article advertising a remedy as the cure for diabetes.

The third video uploaded by Laut Products, which we found, showed a video with an ABC news logo, which was to authenticate the genuineness of the video of a protest in which the speaker alleged that diabetic patients in Nigeria were protesting due to an unnamed pharmacy company refusing to release a cure for diabetes produced by a doctor. However, we found no such protest had ever happened in Nigeria, and the URL in the sponsored post led to a blog advertising a drug for diabetic patients.

For the Eco Puzzling page, we found a video that had the logo of the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), wherein the narrator said a cure for arthritis had been found in Nigeria. After initial 15 seconds, another video featured a male doctor in a lab coat sitting in an office environment believed to be a hospital, aiming to enhance the credibility of the video’s content. The video was subjected to the InVid video verification tool, and findings from the video fragmentation were used to conduct a Pimeyes and Yandex reverse image search, which revealed that the presenter in the video was Rachel Scott of ABC and the doctor was Hatim Habib, a Sudanese surgeon at the Verkhneuralsk Hospital in Verkhneuralsky District in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia.

His video was picked from a documentary made by 14.ru, a Russian media platform, in 2021. The URL on the sponsored post would lead to a website entitled, “Why do hundreds of Nigerians become disabled? Who will save them from joint disease?”

The website used a Shutterstock image uploaded on November 9, 2020, and passed the individual in the video off as a Nigerian doctor named Maduka Abara, said to have designed a product that would allow the treatment of joint disease called “Fast Active.”

The other pages we came across during our investigation into Laut Product and Eco Puzzling included: The Walking Tall, Family Tree, Dr. Matthew Lee, Fluate, Dr. Emily Johnson, A Medical Mistery, Anwar Rida, Deal Moth 31, Midhawi, Suhileatan Health Good, and Natural Media.

Almost all the pages used various images and videos of a United States-based Nigerian-born scientist and medical researcher, Dr. Samuel Achilefu, as the creator of various drugs and remedies for various diseases.

Dr. Achilefu, in response to one of the videos on his LinkedIn account, denied endorsing any of those products.

The Walking Tall page sponsored a video on January 28, 2024, claiming that a Nigerian doctor had developed a remedy for hypertension.

The sponsored video claimed that normal blood pressure could be restored in a few hours or days with a novel medication created by a Nigerian physician.

The video featured Kayode Okikiolu of Channels Television delivering the “News at 10.” The caption on the video read, “Shocking discovery: 4 out of 6 people with high blood pressure can lose their sight permanently.”

To increase the legitimacy of the video’s content, a second video with a man sitting against the backdrop of “Expo 2020 Dubai” was added after the first 12 seconds. The video had been viewed more than 498,000 times.

An analysis of the video with Kayode Okikiolu appeared to show that lip movement did not align with what was being said in the video, as only the mouth was moving while other parts of his body were static, which was unusual for a typical video. This video may have been manipulated using AI.

The video’s second frame included the supposed doctor explaining how the medication would treat hypertension in less than a week. Upon a closer inspection, it became clear that the voice-over was added to the second video because the man’s lips were moving too quickly to match the words he was purportedly saying.

Upon utilising the INVID verification tool and conducting a reverse image search on the fragmented video, we discovered that the alleged physician was Dr. Ini Urua. At the time, he was the Deputy Director and Head of Country Relations at the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC).

His clip used in the video was cut from Expo 2020 Dubai, which took place in the United Arab Emirates in 2022, which Urua attended. The video was deliberately merged into the other one and used in a misleading context.

We found three videos on Dr. Emily Johnson’s page, two of which were sponsored.

One was a one-minute-long video in which the Arise TV logo and presenter, Ojy Okpe, was shown, and the other video also featured Dr. Achilefu.

Both videos alleged that Dr. Achilefu had produced a cure for hypertension with a proven efficacy of 99 percent. Both videos also had Dr. Achilefu speaking about high blood pressure being a common cause of death in Africa and how the continent couldn’t do anything to address it.

The video alleged that Dr. Achilefu had produced a natural remedy that normalises blood pressure in a couple of weeks and permanently normalises it after the course of treatment.

Both videos had links to the sponsored posts that led to the same website, with the Arise TV logo that had Dr. Achilefu promoting products named Normatone and Cardiovax as the natural remedies mentioned in the videos. However, the display picture used in portraying the purported Dr. Emily Johnson was an istockphoto uploaded on May 6, 2016.

On Dr. Matthew Lee’s page, we found a sponsored post about diabetes that included the CNN logo over an Arise TV backdrop with Ojy Okpe presenting.

It introduced a medication claiming to have a 98 percent proven efficacy in returning blood pressure to normal in a few weeks, and it encouraged viewers to visit its website to purchase the medication.

The page used a white man in a lab coat as a profile picture. The image being passed off as Matthew Lee was that of Dr. Robert Kruger, a United States geriatric internal medicine physician in the Air Force.

An analysis of Matthew Lee’s page on Ad Library revealed that 16 posts were launched in June 2024, with 15 in Arabic and one in English, that targeted Nigerian Facebook users.

We found two videos on the Fluate page in which one claimed Achilefu had cured thousands of cancer patients and was introducing his newly developed product. One of the videos was uploaded on April 19, 2024, and generated more than 498,000 views, 589 comments, and 379 reshares. The second video was uploaded on May 17 and generated no fewer than 1,300,000 views. Both videos were observed to have been manipulated as the lip movements did not align with the audio.

The voice in the video also urged viewers to do away with Losartan and Enalapril, two drugs that could treat high blood pressure (hypertension), and replace them with Dr Achilefu’s medicines.

The Grigory Shapovalov page also shared one of the same videos promoted by the Fluate page. The video which had been viewed more than 483,000 times, had received 182 comments, and had been shared 239 times.

Another page that used Achilefu in its promotion was a page named in Arabic (رضا أنور(, translated to Anwar Rida in English. The page promoted three videos using Dr. Achilefu’s images on the websites(s) and videos.

The URLs provided by the page-sponsored videos would lead to websites advertising drugs such as Cordis, Normatone, and Cardiovax. According to the website, Cordis protects the heart from attacks as well as other cardiovascular diseases and normalises the blood pressure just after a course of treatment.

Cordis, according to information found on a label online, listed ingredients and other details for an Indonesian company, PT SJA Global Cosmindo.

When the company was contacted about the product on Whatsapp, it denied it had manufactured the product, adding that it was a cosmetic company and not a medicine-producing firm.

Additionally, we also came across a page named Natural Media in June 2024. The video featured former General Director of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Chikwe Ihekweazu, and Arise TV newsreader, Amaka Udeh.

The video portrayed a scenario in which the Arise TV newsreader was interviewing Dr. Ihekweazu and asking him if he was sacked due to making an innovative discovery in the fight against hypertension.

The video also urged viewers to click the link provided in the sponsored post, which led to a scanty blog article entitled, “A healthy nation or bureaucracy? Why was the Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control fired?” advertising a remedy called Cardizoom.

However, Chikwe Ihekweazu was not sacked by the Nigerian government as the Director-General of NCDC but resigned in 2021 after he was appointed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as an Assistant Director-General in charge of Health Emergency Intelligence at the global health organisation.

Also, during the 54-second video, Udeh and Ihekweazu’s facial characteristics appeared distorted, which was a clear indication of AI manipulation because their lips did not synchronise with the words being spoken.

We further found a June 11, 2024 sponsored two-minute video on Facebook of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, digitally manipulated, wherein Soyinka was speaking about living with high blood pressure for over 15 years after being diagnosed with hyperion at 50 years old.

Soyinka’s cloned voice in the video urged viewers to go to the link, which would lead to a Legit News-branded website promoting Normatone as a cure.

We conducted a reverse image search on a screenshot captured in the video and found that the Soyinka video was cut from a video uploaded on YouTube on December 23, 2023, by the Louisiana channel.

Techniques and tactics employed by the pages

To gain insight into Laut Product and Eco Puzzling’s Facebook operations, we first examined the pages’ timelines and ad libraries. We then looked into the website URLs that were found on the pages using a variety of paid and open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools that were freely available online. These tools allowed us to see the strategies used by the pages in question.

Both pages were observed to have the same post published on December 29, 2023, on their timelines calling for website visits for medicines for diabetics, blood pressure, and arthritis and prostatitis all written in English, and another in Bangla, the official language of Bangladesh.

We found some of the videos with thousands of views and hundreds of people’s comments asking how they could purchase the drugs being advertised.

We also observed that they deployed the strategy of not allowing their videos to appear on their timelines, as they were uploaded through the Facebook ad manager and promoted. The URL links appearing on the posts served as the landing page for the sponsored content.

We also observed Laut Products and Eco Puzzling strategies of operation on Facebook with the other pages we found on Facebook.

One of the tools we used, DomainTools, revealed that URLs were sub-main to a website, josefinaa.com, which we found is hosted on Cloudflare.

We also discovered that Josefinaa.com had more than 40 sub-domains registered under it in different languages. We found that the URL of sub-domains would lead to blogs posting scanty articles on health-related issues, promoting and advertising cures for different diseases. (Excel documents to Josefinaa subdomains)

Some sub-domains would lead to websites in Swahili, German, Malay, English, Bangla, Hindi, French, and Spanish. We went through all the websites linked to every promoted video and were able to track Laut Products and Eco Puzzling Facebook ad library pages and observed that they were being used to promote unlicensed pharmaceutical products as cures for diseases.

On Josefinaa.com and its subdomains, we discovered promos for products such as GlucoPro, Normatone, Cardioton, Metabon, DiabeCode Stop Diabetics, and Fast Active.

These were the same products advertised in the digitally manipulated videos sponsored on Facebook.

We also found sales websites online where products promoted on Facebook were being sold. An interested buyer would be directed to drop their phone number and name to be contacted for the transaction. We did this with two of the websites and received a call the next day inquiring about our location to send the product. The five websites also had contact email addresses to which we sent messages, but all bounced back.

We shared our findings with the Post-Marketing Surveillance (PMS) Directorate of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Fraden Bitrus, and asked if the government agency had approved the drugs promoted on Facebook for sale in Nigeria. In response, Bitrus said none had been registered by NAFDAC and therefore should not be on sale.

“Metabon whole body cleanse is under processing for registration but is not registered and should not be on the market for sale,” he said.

Also, a US-trained registered nurse, Peter Gerald, in an interview, said the diseases, which the Facebook pages were advertising cures for, were chronic ailments that could only be managed and improved upon through lifestyle changes and medications depending on the severity of the cases.

An Abuja, Nigeria–based doctor, Kingsley Onwuka, said, “Hypertension is a lifelong condition that can only be well-controlled with lifestyle modification and/or drugs. No one is said to be cured per se.”

Onwuka added, “Whether arthritis is curable depends on the type of arthritis and the age of the patient. As a doctor, I don’t prescribe herbal supplements because their contents, dosages, and side effects have not been proven. They have not undergone clinical trials.”

A further analysis of the Josefinaa.com sub-domains revealed that images of professionals in different fields were being used to promote drugs and supplements as cures for different diseases. We also observed that some of the sub-domains changed content with every refresh.

One example is Sherita Hill Golden, an American physician who is the Hugh P. McCormick Family Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Johns Hopkins University. She was, however, identified in one of the Josefinaa subdomains as a leading Nigerian endocrinologist who made an effective diabetes cure product.

Another subdomain with the Channel Television logo had Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu, a Nigerian-American physician, forensic pathologist, and neuropathologist who was the first to discover and publish findings on chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But the website described him in the interview as a cardiovascular surgeon and specialist at the Department of Endocrinology who developed a permanent diabetes cure called GlucoPro. Another blog used his images and name to promote a diabetic drug called DiabeCode.

Using the Channel Television logo is to portray the interview as credible. We found the same interview and Channels Television logo in four other Josefinaa subdomains.

Another website used a stock image of a black doctor uploaded in 2014 as a Nigerian doctor named Dr. Ibrahim Abdullah, who developed a product called “Stop Diabetics” as a permanent cure for diabetes.

The doctor, who was shown as being interviewed, discouraged the use of metformin, a drug used in treating high blood sugar levels, and instead urged readers to use Stop Diabetics, said to have been developed in 2015 by the Institute of Endocrinology of Nigeria. The interview was to promote the product, GlucoPro, as a drug that could completely cure all types of diabetes.

The same strategy deployed by Laut Products and Eco Puzzling of using images of professionals on websites for promotional purposes was also deployed by the other pages we found during our investigation.

The Natural Media page, which we came across in June 2024, was observed through Facebook page transparency to have been created in July 2022 and was earlier known as কে ন ভাই? (a Bangla language translated to “Why bro” in English using Google Translate) and changed to Natural Media in May 2024.

Analysis of the page on the ad library observed that it mainly sponsored posts about European politics; some were about Euro politicians.

The manufacturer of Stop Diabetics in India, Hanisan Healthcare Private Limited, denied in response to an inquiry, that the company was behind the digitally manipulated videos and that the contract with the manufacturer only had them produce and sell in India.

Hanisan also said that the product was manufactured as a supplement for diabetic patients and not as a drug.

The main manufacturer of Stop Diabetics, Nutritionist Pro, which is visible on the drug pack, did not respond to an email inquiry sent to the company on July 1, 2024.

A researcher and head of investigation with HumAngle, Kunle Adebajo, said the videos seemed to work quite well in the promotion of uncertified medical solutions, which not only deprived people of their hard-earned money but also endangered their lives.

“These actors would often use the images of newsreaders or other reputable individuals. And they even promote some of these posts, meaning the content moderation and ad review mechanisms are very weak. Social media platforms need to do more to track such harmful content. They should empower users to easily report them and bolster their capacity to swiftly work on such complaints,” Adebajo said.

Use of a fake location

The information obtained from DomainTools revealed that the website registrant’s name is Aleksandr Kovalenko, the city registrant is in Kiev, and the registrant state or province is Kievskaya.

The information alleged that josefinaa.com website was registered in Ukraine, but the information seems suspicious as Kievskaya is a Russian name and does not refer to any city in Ukraine. It is the name of the Moscow Metro station in the Dorogomilovo District, Western Administrative Okrug, Moscow.

One of the Facebook pages, Eco Puzzling, also sets its location in Ajah, Lagos State, Nigeria, and Laut Products in Delhi, India. However, Facebook uses IP addresses to determine where a page is operating from.

Other pages also set their different locations based on what the Facebook page transparency
section provided about where the pages are being managed.

These pages continue to operate their fraudulent operations and spread misleading health
information without being discovered by Facebook, despite the red flags that are visible. Many
social media users are suffering and becoming unwitting victims as a result.

In an interview, a legal practitioner, Adedamola Solesi, said Meta cannot be held liable for the videos uploaded on Facebook claiming to have cures for some diseases.

“Meta cannot be held liable for any third-party infringement. Since they have put in mechanisms for any fake news or false news to be reported or flagged, I believe that it is the joint responsibility of not just Facebook alone but also users to report such cases. If we take a cue from the United States, we can see that we have a plethora of court cases vindicating and absolving social media platforms from infringement, crimes, breach of contract, or falsehood that are attributed to third parties,” Solesi said.

However, a human rights activist, Charles Muoneme, disagreed. He said Meta would not absolve itself from the fraud being committed on its platform.

“Meta is liable. If someone perpetrates a crime through a platform you created, you are liable because you have not put sufficient measures in place to curb it. Meta hasn’t done enough to check these deceits on its platform.”

By: Shehu Olayinka

August 8, 2024