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Influencers are increasingly advertising prescription medicines on social media, and the financial relationships behind these promotions are largely invisible to regulators and the public. This brief discusses how Congress and federal regulators can address this issue, including: Passing the Protecting Patients from Deceptive Drug Ads Act, utilizing lessons learned from the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, and designing an Influencer Open Payments Database that Works. Read the full issue brief.

Nearly 90% of teens and young adults who use social media say they use it to find information about their healthcare. But when young people open our feeds, we are often faced with a barrage of dangerous misinformation and misleading content about the prescription drugs we desperately need to live full, healthy lives.

Generation Patient is documenting a new trend of placing one minute of drug ads in front of two minutes of safety disclosures. This timing means that most young adults will skip drug safety disclosures.

Device ads on social media use the same practices the FDA is beginning to enforce against drug promotions:

1. Undisclosed paid partnerships with manufacturers;

2. Safety disclosures shown alongside distracting images;

3. Misleading statements about regulatory status; and

4. Deep fakes and deceptive white-coat personas

Whether it’s in viral content paid for by a telehealth company pushing an expensive service, comments and DMs from an influencer paid by a drug manufacturer, or targeted ads that follow us around the internet, young people have been left on our own to sort through information that’s designed to take advantage of our vulnerabilities.

Generation Patient is Documenting Medical Device Ads on Social Media and Calling for Enforcement Against Deceptive Practices by:

1. Documenting medical device ads using publicly available databases, such as the Meta library;

2. Publishing issue briefs describing how devices are marketed to young adults on social media

3. Petitioning the Federal Trade Commission for rules specific to deceptive medical device ads

4. Reporting deceptive medical device ads on social media to the Food and Drug Administration

5. Calling on social media platforms to adopt policies governing medical device advertisements

6. Educating members of Congress on existing gaps in federal statutes and agency enforcement

Explaining the Protecting Patients from Deceptive Drug Ads Act

The Protecting Patients from Deceptive Drug Ads Act is a bipartisan effort that directs the FDA to update and enforce regulations for how prescription drugs are marketed on social media, specifically targeting deceptive or misleading content posted by influencers, healthcare providers, and telehealth companies.

The bill will take on the misinformation polluting our feeds by:

• Enforcing the same accurate information requirement on social media advertising that the FDA has for ads on TV, in newspapers, etc. That means making sure all drug communications on social media must include clear and accurate information about side effects, contraindications, and effectiveness.

• Creating penalties for influencers, healthcare providers, and telehealth companies who benefit financially from sharing misleading information about prescription drugs on social media. 

• Directing the FDA to monitor communications that are specific to social media, like comment sections and viral trend hopping.

• Making the FDA keep a payment disclosure database where payments made to influencers or healthcare providers to promote drugs must be reported and made public.

• Establishing a task force in coordination with the Federal Trade Commission to enhance monitoring and enforcement with respect to prescription drug advertisements.

It has been over three years since Generation Patient started calling on the FDA to be proactive and bring its regulation out of the social media stone age. With the passage of this legislation and the consultation of young adult patients in the enforcement process, the FDA will have everything it needs to address this serious threat to public health.

Engaging Young Adult Patients

Put simply: no one knows the danger of this content better than us. As young adults with chronic medical conditions, we are the target audiences for a massive amount of pharmaceutical advertising on social media and the industry’s tactics are designed to get us, as potential lifelong consumers, on the hook for life. 

With the FDA now empowered to properly regulate this space, it is essential that it engages young adult patients and brings them in to co-create material, assess health information, and inform regulation.

Patient Testimonials