Health disinformation permeates digital ecosystems, undermining public policies, spreading conspiracy theories, and promoting unproven treatments. Native advertising has emerged as a key strategy in this process, as its deceptive format makes promotional content indistinguishable from news. Our study examines health-related native advertising on Brazilian news websites, assessing regulatory compliance, advertiser credibility, persuasive strategies, and potential harm to audiences.

We developed web crawlers to collect native ads from two prominent and contrasting Brazilian news outlets, O Globo and Revista Oeste, distributed through Taboola’s service. Between August 1 and 24, 2023, we gathered 141,915 ads and analyzed their content, advertisers, and promoted products. We also conducted a network analysis to determine whether there were advertisers common to both websites. To evaluate advertiser reliability, we categorized their persuasion strategies, including clickbait, redirection to suspicious websites, promotion of questionable products, fake sales, and disinformation. A visual analysis using computational modeling identified the main themes and patterns in gender and age representation.

Our findings reveal multiple regulatory violations, including misleading language, unsubstantiated claims, and the promotion of unregistered products. The study also reveals a commonality in ad distribution across both sites, indicating the opacity of Taboola’s criteria. These results align with previous research on the ethical concerns surrounding health advertising, native ads, and journalistic credibility. Our study contributes to the debate on disinformation and digital advertising by providing new evidence on how the lack of oversight in the native advertising market facilitates health disinformation and exploits audience vulnerabilities to promote harmful content.

This paper discusses health disinformation, focusing on the example of disinformation about contraception on social media, to understand the context within which alternative contraceptives like Natural Cycles are advertised. Natural Cycles is a digital contraceptive app that uses body temperature data to predict and confirm ovulation in order to confirm fertility status. It has grown in popularity on social media alongside the increase in contraceptive disinformation. The paper presents a discussion of the context of disinformation along with a close reading of the visual and textual elements of the Natural Cycles influencer advertisements, drawing on work on influencers, platform economies and authenticity to show how lived experiences are co-opted for commercial purposes to promote products like Natural Cycles. I find that the context of contraceptive disinformation feeds into wider wellness and right-wing ‘tradwife’ trends, which are evoked by the influencer advertisements studied. As such, I contend that while Natural Cycles influencer advertisements do not directly contain disinformation, the techniques employed evoke similar messages as the trends that do contain disinformation. In so doing, the advertisements co-opt influencers’ lived experiences to present Natural Cycles as a superior alternative to hormonal contraception. Thus, Natural Cycles effectively promotes its product while avoiding the criticism levelled at contraceptive disinformation.

As digital technologies reshape how faith communities communicate and operate, religious leaders extend their influence into online spaces where spiritual and health-related beliefs converge. This study is the first to investigate health discourse and misinformation on KingsChat, the social networking platform of the Christ Embassy megachurch in Nigeria led by Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, a known source of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and health misinformation.

By scraping public KingsChat posts matching selected health search terms in addition to any posts from individuals in Christ Embassy church leadership, a dataset of 12,443 posts was collected. Keyword analysis identified various health discourse patterns, particularly around misinformation concerning COVID-19, vaccines, faith healing and malaria. To better understand health-related content in these posts, a random sample of posts containing health terms was manually coded. This found that 35% of health-related posts contained a debunked or unsubstantiated health-related claim. The largest two categories of misinformation involved faith healing and conspiratorial narratives about vaccines. Additional investigation of the external URLs linked to from KingsChat posts also exposes cross-platform interactions in the way the church distributes and amplifies health messages across digital spaces.

These findings underscore challenges facing public health officials working with communities where Christ Embassy church is influential. Understanding the interplay of digital media ecosystems, as well as the motivations and strategies for spreading health information online, will help researchers propose effective interventions and public health measures while respecting community norms.