Wellness influencers fueled pandemic misinformation. Now they’re targeting

CNN
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When wildfire ripped through Hawaii’s Maui last August, the impact was devastating: a whole town reduced to ashes, more than 100 lives lost. The inferno was described as the “largest natural disaster in state history.”

But some on Instagram suggested, without evidence, there was something much more nefarious at play.

Wellness influencer @truth_crunchy_mama told her 37,000 followers to “stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government.” They’re “going to keep setting wildfires until we all submit to their climate change agenda,” she said in another post.

Health influencer @drmercola suggested to his 504,000 followers whether, while the media focused on climate change, the fires might have been deliberately set to “to facilitate a land grab” to make the area a “smart city” — referring to a technology-focused urban design idea.

A natural parenting influencer, whose Instagram page is filled with soft-focus pictures of herself against pretty pastel backgrounds, inferred to her 76,000-strong community that Hawaii’s wildfires were started by “directed energy weapons” — systems which use energy such as laser beams.

These posters are all wellness influencers — a loosely-defined umbrella term for a wide range of accounts including yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health and new age spirituality.

While conspiracy theories about the Hawaii wildfires spread across the internet last year, it may seem surprising they were also seized upon by part of the wellness community.

But for years there has been a merging of wellness, disinformation and conspiracy, as a subset of influencers use the backdrop of aesthetically pleasing, pastel-colored posts to spread much darker messages, weaving together alarming conspiracy theories with calls for users to buy their supplements or services.

This phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, when anti-vax sentiment took hold in large parts of the wellness community. As interest in the pandemic waned, experts say some wellness influencers have latched on to climate change to galvanize followers.

Their concern: Those influencers — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — are exposing new, and younger, audiences to a slew of misinformation and undermining efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

Cécile Simmons, a trained yoga teacher, was surprised when many of the wellness accounts she followed started posting about climate change. “It just started popping up in my feed and I thought OK, that’s interesting, now that COVID is ‘over’ they’re diversifying the narrative,” she told CNN.

Simmons, also a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank focused on disinformation, started digging. She pored over more than 150 wellness accounts, most of which had between 10,000 to 100,000 followers. All offered wellness advice, sold related products and promoted some form of misinformation.

The claims Simmons found were sweeping and varied, ranging from outright climate denial to attempts to undermine climate solutions by portraying them as part of a global plot for control.

Some focused on deadly extreme weather events, saying they were orchestrated by the government, or that malign global forces were modifying the weather. Others claimed climate policies were a plot to control people’s lives, bodies and diets. A small section of new age accounts asserted that climate change was the result of a disconnection with forces in the universe.

Rejecting climate action may seem counterintuitive for wellness influencers, who often focus on nature or evoke bucolic visions of the past. But when you have insight into this world, it tracks, Simmons said.

A strong…