Healthcare BS Is Clogging the Internet's Arteries

Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.

NewsGuard initially covered a few thousand well-trafficked sites, but now covers more than 35,000 sources around the world. Along the way the company has built a tool for advertisers to identify quality inventory for programmatic advertising, several AI-related products, and a database of false claims circulating like microplastics in the information ecosystem’s bloodstream.

As we caught up this week, I told Brill and Crovitz about my work at DOC, which has a mission of finding signal in the increasingly noisy world of longevity science and medicine. “Oh,” said Brill, “did you know that healthcare is the largest category of false claims that we track online?”

I didn’t know, but upon reflection it certainly makes sense. According to Brill, healthcare makes up 931 of the 3,254 provably false claims in NewsGuard’s false claims data base – nearly 30 percent. Why? In one word, Brill told me, money. Hucksters and charlatans have a well-worn playbook leveraging bullshit claims on social media to sell supplements, therapeutics, and services that fail to meet traditional standards of rigorous scientific evidence. The fact that a notorious conspiracy theorist is now in charge of our country’s entire healthcare apparatus certainly isn’t helping.

Brill dedicated a chapter in his recent book, The Death of Truth, to the spread of healthcare-related bullshit. Ten years ago, Brill wrote a deeply reported (and very personal) piece on the mess that is the American healthcare system (it became a best selling book as well). The rise of AI, Brill told me, is only exacerbating the problem.

I’ve been skeptical of the claims made by the tech and AI industry as LLMs and chatbots begin to take over nearly every aspect of the Internet as we’ve known it. My conversation with Brill and Crovitz only deepened my skepticism. When companies like Microsoft claim its AI outperforms doctors, resulting in “a genuine step toward medical super-intelligence,” we tend to scan the headline, shrug, and move on.

But what does “medical super-intelligence” actually mean? Machines are always going to process data faster and more completely than humans. But the interpretation and provision of healthcare is a uniquely human endeavor.  Before we outsource our actions to AI, we best engage in extended and considered debate about the impact of these technologies on our society. If these topics animate your thinking, I hope you’ll consider joining us at DOC, where we’ll be debating exactly these kinds of issues. You can apply for an invitation here.

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