'Vaccine Misinformation for Profit: Conspiratorial Wellness Influencers and the Monetization of Alternative Health' by Rachel E Moran, Anna L Swan and Taylor Agajanian in (2024) 18 International Journal of Communication 1202–1224 comments
Influencers in the alternative health and wellness space have leveraged the affordances of social media to make posting misleading content and misinformation a lucrative endeavor. This research project extends knowledge of antivaccine misinformation through an examination of the role of social media influencers and the parasocial relationships they build with audiences in the spread of vaccine-opposed messaging and how this information is leveraged for profit. Through digital ethnography and media immersion, we focus on three prominent antivaccine influencers—the Wellness Homesteader, Conspiratorial Fashionista, and Evangelical Mother—analyzing how they build community on Instagram, promote antivaccination messaging, and weaponize this information to direct their followers to buy products and services.
Misinformation is an immensely profitable endeavor. Amplifiers of misinformation have found routes to monetize their digital content by using it to direct their online followers to purchase the products and services they endorse. Far-right news and opinion site Infowars, for instance, made $165 million between 2015 and 2018, selling health supplements and merchandise through the Infowars store (Vaillancourt, 2022) advertised during Alex Jones’ talk radio shows, often attached to misinformation narratives or in the context of discussing conspiracy theories (Locker, 2017). This project explores how misinformation is monetized, focusing specifically on how influencers within the antivaccination movement use social media to amplify misleading information about vaccinations and leverage this information for profit.
Although vaccine misinformation far predates COVID-19, its scale and prominence have increased immensely because of the pandemic (Wardle & Singerman, 2021). Extant research has identified a range of vaccine-related misinformation, including spurious claims that the vaccine contains microchips (Virality Project, 2022) and broader attacks on the safety, efficacy, and necessity of COVID-19 vaccines (Brennen, Simon, Howard, & Nielsen, 2020). Further research has explored the dominant sources of vaccine misinformation, identifying the spread of vaccine opposition from antivaccine influencers (Center for Countering Digital Hate [CCDH], 2021)—in addition to a top-down amplification of misinformation from political elites (Enders, Uscinski, Klofstad, & Stoler, 2020).
Alternative health and wellness influencers were a cause for concern during the COVID-19 pandemic because of their ties to misinformation and vaccine hesitancy (Maloy & De Vynck, 2021). Leveraging a lack of trust in Western institutionalized medicine, some wellness influencers have pushed hyperindividualistic frameworks that dispute the need for collective vaccine uptake in favor of natural wellness (Kale, 2021). Furthermore, the sociotechnical savvy of wellness influencers affords them significant reach for their content. A report from the CCDH (2020) noted that the top 12 antivaccine influencers gained 877,000 followers between December and June 2020 (p. 5). Beyond numerical reach, the parasocial relationships built via social media exacerbate the impact of vaccine misinformation. Moreover, influencers well-versed in the economic and technical infrastructures of social media are well positioned to financially benefit from the misinformation they share.
This article opens by discussing research on the spread of vaccine-related misinformation on social media and within the health and wellness space, as well as the role of parasocial relationships in this spread. By highlighting the role of gender in both the saliency of health-related misinformation and the monetization of wellness content, we offer insight into the gendered dimension of misinformation spread. We then present our methods, drawing on a digital ethnography of three wellness influencers on Instagram. Ultimately, our analysis reveals how influencers take advantage of the platform’s sociotechnical infrastructure and attempt to profit from misinformation while normalizing antivaccine sentiment and conspiratorial rhetoric.
