Amazon Prime Video is full of dodgy documentaries pushing dangerous cancer 'cures'

Amazon's streaming site is crammed with pseudoscientific documentaries laden with conspiracy theories and pointing viewers towards unproven treatments
Getty Images / Zairi Azmal Bin Burham / EyeEm / WIRED

The homepage of Amazon’s Prime Video is full of glossy Amazon originals and big-budget films designed to tempt people into subscribing to the firm’s video streaming platform. But peek below the surface of Prime Video and you’ll find a deep well of pseudoscientific documentaries pushing potentially harmful cancer ‘cures’, suggesting that fluoride in water causes neurological diseases and arguing that gene-edited crops are harmful to human health.

At its best, Prime Video’s disturbing underbelly is stuffed with conspiracy theory-laden content, but at its worst the platform’s recommendation algorithms push viewers towards dangerous medical misinformation masquerading as fact. Other films available through Prime Video suggest that diseases like cancer and diabetes can be “reversed” by eating plants, or that cancer can be cured using unproven treatments.

Until May 31, 2019, the first search result for “cancer” on Prime Video was a 2017 documentary Cancer Can Be Killed, which focuses on one woman who is “cured of her cancer in 30 days” after being given a variety of “natural” treatments in Germany, including an alternative cancer drug called laetrile that breaks down into cyanide in the gut and can cause serious side effects.

From there Prime Video suggests watching a 2014 documentary called Second Opinion, which claims that laetrile “stopped the spread of cancer and they lied to us about it.” The drug is a partly synthetic version of a substance called amygdalin found in some plants, and is sometimes called vitamin B17 despite it not being a vitamin. A 2015 study reviewing all the available published research on laetrile concluded that using the substance as a cancer treatment was not supported by clinical data, and that because of the side effects the “risk–benefit balance” of the treatment was “unambiguously negative”.

Similarly, the top search result for “cancer cure” on Prime Video was Burzynski: Cancer Cure Cover Up, a documentary about Stanislaw Burzynski, a proponent of alternative medicine, and his alternative cancer treatment antineoplaston therapy, with the tagline “suppressing a cure for more than 40 years”. The documentary claims that regulatory agencies “fear the approval” of the treatment for financial reasons.

Antineoplastons are chemical compounds found in blood and urine, and are made of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Burzynski claims that people with cancer don’t have enough and giving them antineoplastons made in the lab will treat their cancer, but according to the charity Cancer Research UK there is not enough evidence that antineoplaston therapy works. The treatment is not approved by the FDA and there have been no randomised control trials published in peer reviewed scientific journals showing its effectiveness.

“At no point in time does the film suggest anyone go out and receive laetrile,” says Burzynski: Cancer Cure Cover-Up writer and director Eric Merola.

Another documentary, Healing Cancer From Inside Out claims that “cancer can be successfully healed with dietary treatments” and that conventional cancer treatments are no better than a sugar pill. After WIRED sent links to three of the films, Burzynski: Cancer Cure Cover Up, Cancer Can Be Killed, and Behind the Fear: The Hidden Story of HIV, all three films became unavailable to stream and no longer appear in search results, although other similar films remain online. The company did not respond to any requests for comment.

Martin Ledwick, head information nurse at Cancer Research UK, says unproven cancer treatments like those described in these documentaries pose a “real risk” to health because people will sometimes opt for them instead of conventional therapy. “There is also the chance that they can interfere with any ongoing treatment in some unknown way, making it less effective or causing patients harm,” he says. “Plus they can be extremely expensive, leaving patients and their families in a difficult financial situation.”

“Many cancer patients will understandably cling to any hope that is offered to them, however unrealistic,” he says. “As a general rule, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Read more: Amazon sells 'autism cure' books that suggest children drink toxic, bleach-like substances

It’s not just cancer that Prime Video has a problem with. Until May 31, the first result for a search of “HIV” was Behind the Fear: The Hidden Story of HIV which opens with the statement “There is no AIDS epidemic” and suggests that HIV does not cause AIDs. Its director, Nicole Zwiren, says that the film was made “in order to encourage people to figure out all of the controversies surrounding HIV and make up their own mind about the issue.”

The top result for “vaccines” is still The Pathological Optimist – a documentary about Andrew Wakefield, a former doctor who was struck off the UK medical register in 2010 for authoring a research paper that wrongly linked the MMR vaccine to autism. “Our film, The Pathological Optimist, is a character study on Dr. Andrew Wakefield during a particular time in his life when he attempts to fight for his name in a Texas court case. Which he subsequently lost. The film in no way promotes his pseudoscience or alternative therapies like some of the other films out there,” says its director, Miranda Bailey.

Once you show an interest in one of these films, Amazon will recommend more pseudoscience. From the Burzynski documentary, Prime Video will tell you customers also watched The Great Culling: Our Water which suggests that fluoride in drinking water is causing disease. From there you’ll find Bad Seed: The Truth About Our Food which claims to “exposes a vast conspiracy to contaminate and control the world's food supply through genetic engineering of food crops.” Next up is GMO OMG, a widely-criticised film about genetically modified food, and Foods that Cure Disease which suggests that plants can “reverse” cancer and diabetes. “When interviewing for this documentary I saw a substantial improvement in my lipid panels by eating what [people interviewed in the documentary] suggested I eat. So I believe they have a very good argument for us to consider,” says its director Craig McMahon.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, says that Amazon should be doing more to combat misinformation on Prime Video, especially when it comes to health content. One way to do that, she says, would be to make sure the top search result for certain keywords is something that’s scientifically accurate, similar to how Twitter prominently displays an NHS tweet first for vaccine-related search terms.

But she also says that public health organisations could do a better job at providing information that speaks to the worries people have when they search for health information online. “We need to get into that environment with better information,” she says. “People go to these others sources because they're not getting what they want in the official sources, or they don't trust it.”

Amazon’s content guidelines for Prime Video state that it does not allow “content that promotes, endorses, or incites the viewer to engage in dangerous or harmful acts” and that the company reserves the right to restrict access to or not offer certain content “in an effort to provide the best customer experience”. A spokesperson for Amazon did not confirm whether the company moderates video content or takes into account the quality of information before a film becomes available for streaming.

In March, the company took down Vaxxed, a documentary directed by Andrew Wakefield, after California Congressman Adam Schiff wrote an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Vaxxed is still available to buy on DVD from Amazon.

"As the largest online marketplace in the world, Amazon is in a unique position to shape consumption," Schiff wrote in his letter. "Amazon's recommendations are not designed to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information and, as a result, harmful anti-vaccine messages have been able to thrive and spread."

There’s no denying the impact Amazon has on our consumption. In 2018 the company said that 100 million people worldwide are Prime subscribers. And while Amazon might draw in subscribers with its original TV series like The Man In The High Castle, anybody with the technical know-how can upload shows to Prime Video that those millions of subscribers can then watch through the platform.

In March, Amazon delisted a handful of books recommending that parents of autistic children force them to drink a bleach-like substance after WIRED published an article detailing the extent of the misinformation. While some of those books were removed, it seems clear that Amazon’s problem with medically harmful content goes well beyond books.

“Amazon has no idea what kind of content is actually up on its site, not at all,” says Renee DiResta, a 2019 Mozilla fellow in media, misinformation, and trust. “The recommendation engine for films and the recommendation engine for books and the recommendation engine for products, they all appear to run the same way, which is to say, is this popular? Did it trend at some point? Does it have a lot of five star reviews?”

“It's deciding what to put in the recommendation engine with absolutely no idea what the content is,” she added. DiResta says Amazon flies under the radar when we think about how misinformation spreads because it is focused less on social sharing and virality than social media platforms, but that its go-to status as a search engine for products mean it should take responsibility for providing people with quality information.

“Amazon does many of the same things that the social platforms have recently stopped doing in terms of amplification of blatant misinformation and content surfacing because of algorithmic gaming,” she says.

In January, YouTube announced that it would start “reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways”, including conspiracy theories and health misinformation. Later it announced that it would demonetise anti-vax channels. In March, Facebook said it would remove groups and pages that share anti-vaccine misinformation from its recommendations, and reduce their ranking in searches.

Ultimately, says Larson, our problems with health misinformation are bigger than any one platform – and exist offline too – but that doesn’t mean Amazon shouldn’t pull its weight when it comes to making sure people are well informed. “There’s no easy answer, and there’s certainly no quick answer,” she says. “We need everybody to do their bit.”

This article was originally published by WIRED UK