Clickbait Cures: Unmasking the Deceptive Health Ad Infrastructure on Meta and Google
Collected 350,549 Facebook ads and 2,073 Google ads (2023-2026) promoting unregulated nutraceuticals with false medical claims, reaching an estimated 878 million accounts across the EU on Facebook; 20% of the 390 products studied had been flagged by EU or national health authorities as illegal or dangerous, yet coordinated advertiser networks kept promoting them.
About this research
This original report draws on API/data analysis.
- Publication
- Original report · 67 pages
- Research approach
- API/data analysis
- Geographic focus
- Regional or multinational
- Research materials
- Public-source data is described in the publication
- Methodological notes
- The authors discuss limitations in the source publication.
Publication details prepared by Social Media Transparency from the original source.
Executive summary
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Reset Tech analysed the paid-advertising infrastructure behind unregulated health products ('nutraceuticals') on Meta and Google, assembling a dataset of 350,549 Facebook ads and 2,073 Google ads run between 2023 and 2026 that made false or unproven medical claims.
Across the 390 products the researchers tracked, roughly one in five had already been flagged by EU or national health authorities as illegal or dangerous, yet ads for them continued to run and, on Facebook alone, reached an estimated 878 million accounts across the EU. The promotion was driven by coordinated networks of inauthentic advertiser accounts that survived enforcement by spreading spend across many pages.
The report argues that Meta's and Google's ad systems remain structurally open to deceptive health advertising, and that the platforms' ad repositories and enforcement fall short of what the DSA's advertising-transparency obligations require.
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