For at least several weeks, misleading paid ads have been appearing on Facebook that make the false claim that unspecified “allegations” against “Jeopardy” co-host Mayim Bialik “have been confirmed.” We previously reached out to Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and were reassured that the company had systems and policies in place to take action on these kinds of scammy ads. However, users are still reporting that they’re seeing the ads with pictures of Bialik.
Once clicked, these baseless “allegations” ads lead to a CBD gummies endorsement on a website that features Bialik’s image and likeness, even though she never endorsed the products. The website mentions nothing of the “allegations” referenced in the ad, since that wording was nothing more than a clickbait strategy. The scam page, which was purposely designed to resemble an article on FoxNews.com, says that Bialik appeared on Martha MacCallum‘s TV show on Fox News, where she endorsed her products that can help to “reverse dementia.” However, none of this ever happened.
All of the ads use the same wording: “‘Jeopardy’ fans are up in arms over the allegations pending against Bialik. Here is all the information available to the public at the moment.” Again, none of this was true.
We noticed that a handful of users who posted about seeing the ads said they had reported them using Facebook’s manual reporting tool, which is available to all users. However, as we have seen firsthand in the past with our own reporting, our...
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