![A Meta spokeswoman said: 'We are investigating the findings of this report and will remove ads that violate our policies if we identify [them].' Photograph: Getty Images](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/QQBB4JZNA5WRQJGSU7QDHR2MUE.jpg?auth=dcb67ee3eeed8566a87c25c7ea595c93de6d2be8b3a0337a59508ec3ab914f19&smart=true&width=1024&height=576)
Facebook and Google have generated profits from advertisements for unregulated health supplements, including products deemed illegal by various national health authorities, in breach of European laws, new research has claimed.
Reset Tech, a German-headquartered non-profit with ties to eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, said it has collected more than 352,000 advertisements promoting so-called clickbait cures on Meta’s and Google’s platforms.
The policy and research organisation said the adverts constitute a “direct violation” of articles 34 and 35 of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), “regarding systemic risks to public health and the obligations of Very Large Online Platforms”.
In response to questions from The Irish Times last week, Google and Facebook (owned by Meta) said they have strict rules around medical advertisements on their platforms and take swift action to remove content and ban advertisers.
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While there is no Ireland-specific data in the report, both Facebook and Google have their European headquarters in Dublin. Reset Tech has said the adverts have been seen by people across the EU.
On Facebook, from which the researchers collected a sample of 350,549 adverts, it said it found “ads and advertising pages” that “impersonate medical doctors and celebrities and misuse the logos of pharmaceutical companies and other organisations to lend credibility to the promoted products”.
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“The content of these ads violates Meta’s advertising policies against treatments for incurable diseases, promotion of body dysmorphic images, pornography and adult nudity, trademark infringements, and ad cloaking,” the non-profit said in the report.
Researchers said they also found some 1,221 adverts that urged patients with Type 2 diabetes to stop taking Metformin, a widely used medication for the condition.
“One set of 97 ads, running in German in February 2026, read: ‘The doctors have been hiding this. Diabetes will disappear in 2 days. Finally, I was able to abandon Metformin,’” the report states.
“The same playbook targets people with heart disease, hypertension, psoriasis, and cancer,” the researchers said.
“Products are promoted using deepfake videos of doctors, stolen images of celebrities including Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, and the forged logos of companies such as Pfizer, Bayer, and the European Medicines Agency.”
Reset Tech said many of the advertisements have networks behind the campaigns that are not “one-off bad actors”, but “long-term co-ordinated networks used for multiple scams and inauthentic activities”.
This includes “large-scale networks of automatically created burner accounts” that have been “activated continuously since 2022 across multiple scam campaigns, as well as the Russian influence operation Doppelgänger”, said the organisation.
Reset Tech also collected a smaller sample of just over 2,000 adverts from Google.
It said networks of “non-EU advertisers based in Brazil and Vietnam are allowed to run medical ads in the EU, with the platform leaving compliance with EU advertising standards to the advertisers’ discretion”.
A spokeswoman for Meta said: “We don’t allow misleading ads that claim to cure incurable diseases, prohibit the promotion of unsafe products and supplements, and have strict restrictions on how prescription medicine can be advertised on our services.
“We are investigating the findings of this report and will remove ads that violate our policies if we identify [them].”
A spokesman for Google said the search engine giant enforces strict policies against harmful and misleading health content and takes “swift action” against such ads. “Our teams block the vast majority of policy-violating ads before they ever serve to anyone.”
Coimisiún na Méan, the Irish media regulator, is responsible for enforcing the DSA in the Republic. A spokesman said responsibility for enforcing articles 34 and 35 of the act falls to the European Commission.
He said: “If a user sees content or advertising online which they believe to be illegal, they should report this to the online platform where they saw it. Under the DSA, there is an obligation on platforms to act on reports of illegal content.”
