Unfounded cancer cures, dubious anti-vaccine narratives, and false claims that neurological disorders can be “reversed” through diet: influential American and European podcasters are peddling harmful health misinformation while largely escaping scrutiny, researchers say.
Falsehoods on podcasts, which experts warn are fuelling mistrust of conventional medicine, often go unchecked as fact-checkers must sift through hours of transcripts.
They can quickly be amplified when short clips extracted from podcasts ricochet across social media.
Earlier this month, actor and director Mel Gibson said on The Joe Rogan Experience – the number two podcast on Spotify in the United States – that some of his friends had overcome stage four cancer after taking the antiparasitic drugs ivermectin and fenbendazole.