CNN
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When wildfires struck the Hawaiian island of Maui last August, the impact was devastating, reducing entire towns to ashes and killing more than 100 people. The inferno was described as “the greatest natural disaster in state history.”
However, some people on Instagram suggested the following without any evidence: Something even more sinister was going on.
Wellness influencer @truth_crunchy_mama urged her 37,000 followers to “stop blaming nature for things that are actually caused by the government.” They are “going to keep starting wildfires until we all follow their climate change policies,” she said in another post.
Health influencer @drmercola said that while the media has focused on climate change, the fires were intended to “facilitate land grabs” to turn the region into “smart cities,” referring to tech-centric cities. He suggested to his 504,000 followers that the fire may have been set on fire. Urban design ideas.
The natural parenting influencer’s Instagram page features soft-focus photos of herself set against pretty pastel backgrounds, and she tells her community of 76,000 people that the Hawaiian wildfires are “awesome.” He suggested that the attack was caused by “sexual energy weapons,” or systems that use energy such as laser beams.
These posters are all wellness influencers. Wellness influencer is a loosely defined term that covers a wide range of accounts, including yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health, and new-age spirituality.
As conspiracy theories about Hawaii’s wildfires spread, It may come as a surprise that they also gained attention from some in the wellness community on the internet last year.
But for years, health, disinformation, and conspiracies have been merging. Some influencers are spreading darker messages behind beautiful, pastel-colored posts, laced with alarming conspiracy theories and calls for users to buy supplements. or service.
This phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, with anti-vaccine sentiment taking root in large parts of the wellness community. As attention to the pandemic wanes, some wellness influencers are turning to climate change to cheer up their followers, experts say.
Their concern is that these influencers, some of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers, are exposing new and younger audiences to a wealth of misinformation. Undermining efforts to address the climate crisis.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
Aerial photo showing destroyed homes and buildings in the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii on August 10, 2023. The fire became the focus of online conspiracies and misinformation.
Cecil Simmons, a trained yoga teacher, was surprised to find that many of the wellness accounts he follows started posting about climate change. “It just started showing up in my feed and I thought, Okay, this is interesting. Now that COVID is ‘over,’ they’re diversifying the narrative,” she told CNN.
Simmons, who is also a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a British think tank that specializes in disinformation, launched the investigation. She delved into over 150 of her wellness accounts, most of which had her 10,000 to 100,000 followers. All offered health advice, sold related products, and promoted misinformation in some way.
The claims Simmons found range from denying climate change outright to attempts to undermine climate change solutions by portraying climate change as part of a global control plan. , was wide and diverse.
Some focused on deadly extreme weather events, arguing that they were orchestrated by governments or that malign global forces were altering the weather. Some argued that climate change policies were a conspiracy to control people’s lives, bodies, and diets. Some New Age accounts argued that climate change is the result of a disconnect with cosmic forces.
Rejecting climate action may seem counterintuitive for wellness influencers who often focus on nature or evoke people An idyllic vision of the past. But once we gain insight into this world, we can track it, Simmons said.
There is a strong current of individualism in the wellness accounts, as well as a deep distrust of authorities. “They emphasize individual solutions to collective problems and sell health as a response to climate anxiety,” she says.
Many of these influencers claim that they are only speaking truth to power. This is the theme of the @truth_crunchy_mama account, which calls itself a “truth teller.” The account’s operator did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Some even say they accept the human-caused climate crisis.
“Humans have an absolute impact on the environment and climate,” Joseph Mercola, the man behind the Instagram account @drmercola, told CNN. When asked about his comment on the Hawaii wildfires, he said he accepts the consensus that dry conditions and strong winds fueled the fires. “It’s never been explicitly stated that it was intentional, but some have speculated that it might have been,” he said.
His climate posts are often framed this way, not making definitive claims but rather asking questions like: Is the idea of eating insects “a part of the globalist ‘green agenda?’ ” or a promotional guest post suggesting that the “war on climate change” continues: “These are the same tactics used by nefarious individuals who want complete power over the people.”
The wellness industry is worth anywhere from billions to trillions of dollars, or $5.6 trillion, depending on your definition, according to a recent report from industry group The Global Wellness Institute.
And it’s been decades in the making. Its modern incarnation dates back to the late 1950s, said Stephanie Alice Baker, a health and wellness culture researcher at UK City University. American physician Halbert L. Dunn began promoting the idea that health is more than just the absence of disease. Instead, “best health” also means finding purpose and meaning.
The movement gained momentum around the 1970s, and then along with the internet came entrepreneurs and influencers. Wellness has now come to mean just about anything, Baker said, but at its core it revolves around ideas of individualism, self-empowerment, and distrust of institutions, and it’s a near perfect place for conspiracy theories to flourish. It has become a hotbed.
“I don’t think the culture understood how dangerous the rhetoric in the wellness space was until the pandemic,” said Derek Velez, co-host of the podcast “Conspirituality,” which explores the collision between wellness and conspiracy theories. “I think so,” he said. One of the researchers, Marc-Andre Argentino, coined the term “pastel QAnon” to describe the soft, soothing aesthetic that some influencers use to spread a conspiratorial worldview.
The conspiracy theory “usually springs up during times of cultural upheaval or tragedy,” Velez told CNN. COVID-19 brought about one of these tipping points, but climate change is now bringing about another.
Callum Hood, director of research at the Center to Counter Digital Hate, said influencers crave relevance and “climate change is a hugely relevant issue that’s always in the news.”
This is a short ideological leap from a vaccine conspiracy to a climate change conspiracy, Hood told CNN. “If the establishment is wrong about health, then it follows that they are also lying about climate change.”
Tim Caulfield, a misinformation expert and professor of health law and policy at the University of Alberta, says many wellness influencers are now expected to present beliefs that their communities want to hear. He said that “Being against climate change becomes part of being on that team” and a way to “energize the audience,” he added.
Spencer Pratt/Getty Images
Some wellness influencers are exposing a ton of climate misinformation to young audiences.
It may seem easy to ignore this subsection of wellness influencers, but the bond they form with their followers is strong.
Baker says they’re particularly good at creating intimacy because they focus on people’s bodies and direct experiences of the world. It creates a powerful parasocial, or one-sided, connection where followers believe they have a personal relationship with the influencer. Many project authenticity, making themselves appear as if they are outside the system and can speak truth to power, she added.
The appeal of their conspiracy messages is clear, especially when it comes to complex issues like climate change. It’s a chance to ease anxiety and regain independence. “Once you find a conspiracy theory, everything falls apart and everything is simplified. ‘There’s a bad guy lying to you,'” CCDH’s Hood said.
Anger promotes engagement, but determining how this affects the real world is notoriously difficult.
Still, many experts believe there are significant benefits. Mr Caulfield said misinformation about climate change was having a “significant impact” on both people’s beliefs and the normalization of fringe views.That’s not all Not only does it undermine climate solutions, it depoliticizes people and instills distrust in climate change policy.
Experts say they are particularly concerned because it allows misinformation about climate change to reach new audiences. This includes young people who may support climate action.
Mariah Wellman, an assistant professor and wellness expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said research suggests that younger generations get most of their news from platforms like Instagram.
“If the only news they are consuming is from wellness influencers who share disinformation about climate change, they will never realize that the information they are being fed is inaccurate. “Maybe,” Wellman told CNN.
Caulfield said the incentive toward these ideologies is clear, as extreme opinions can increase clicks for influencers, grow their audience, and increase profitability for brands. “And the sad thing is, the more the ideology becomes a theme, the harder it is to change people’s minds, because it’s about belonging to a community.”
However, there are strategies to counter misinformation. Even if it comes from an influencer, Caulfield said that while some people may dismiss it as “frivolous,” it’s important to do it in a respectful and constructive way. . He added that “misunderstanding beforehand” also helps.Stay ahead of misinformation, and It’s about making people aware of the tactics used to promote it.
For others, the focus is much more on other platforms that host these influencers. Hood is calling for clearer climate policy and measures such as banning the amplification and monetization of content that clearly contradicts climate science.
He also called on regulators to scrutinize products and services sold on Instagram and other platforms. “This is the Wild West,” he said.
Meta, which owns Instagram, declined to comment. The company has policies to combat misinformation, including an international team of fact-checkers who evaluate climate science content. Rating a post as false may result in reduced distribution, additional warning labels, and repeat offenders may lose their ability to advertise or monetize.
But for experts like Hood, not enough is being done to address a problem with such alarming implications.
As the climate crisis continues to cause more frequent and severe extreme weather events, it is creating the perfect conditions for climate denial and misinformation to flourish in these areas of the wellness community.
“The dark side of wellness has always been there. We’re only now seeing it,” Simmons said.
