Open AccessAlt. Health Influencers: how wellness culture and web culture have been weaponised to promote conspiracy theories and far-right extremism during the COVID-19 pandemic
Author(s) -
Stephanie Alice Baker
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
european journal of cultural studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.835
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1460-3551
pISSN - 1367-5494
DOI - 10.1177/13675494211062623
Subject(s) - influencer marketing , misinformation , pandemic , media culture , social media , participatory culture , sociology , health communication , public relations , political science , covid-19 , media studies , medicine , business , disease , marketing , pathology , relationship marketing , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law , marketing management
This article examines the proliferation of alt. health influencers during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyse the self-presentation strategies used by four alt. health influencers to achieve visibility and status on Instagram over a 12-month period from 11 March 2020, when the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation. My analysis reveals the ways in which these influencers appeal to the utopian discourses of early web culture and the underlying principles of wellness culture to build and sustain an online following. While early accounts of micro-celebrity treat participatory culture as democratising and progressive, this article demonstrates how the participatory affordances of social media have been exploited to spread misinformation, conspiratorial thinking and far-right extremism. These findings develop previous work on ‘conspirituality’ by demonstrating how wellness culture and web culture can coalesce for authoritarian ends.