CNN
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In August last year, a devastating wildfire tore through Maui, Hawaii, causing extensive damage and claiming over 100 lives, making it the worst natural disaster in the state’s history.
However, some individuals on Instagram propagated groundless claims, hinting at a more sinister cause behind the incident.
A wellness influencer with 37,000 followers, @truth_crunchy_mama, implied that the government was behind the wildfires and suggested that they would continue to set more until their climate change agenda was embraced.
Another influencer, @drmercola, with 504,000 followers, raised doubts about the media’s focus on climate change and proposed that the fires might have been started intentionally to pave the way for a technology-focused urban design concept in the area.
Meanwhile, a natural parenting influencer insinuated to her 76,000 followers that Hawaii’s wildfires were triggered by “directed energy weapons” that utilize energy such as laser beams.
These individuals are part of the wellness influencers – a broad term covering accounts related to yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health, and new age spirituality.
The merging of wellness, disinformation, and conspiracy has been ongoing for years, with a faction of influencers blending alarming conspiracy theories with calls for their audience to buy their supplements or services under the guise of aesthetically pleasing, pastel-colored posts.
The surge in this phenomenon occurred during the pandemic, as anti-vax sentiments gained ground in the wellness community. With the decline in interest in the pandemic, some wellness influencers have shifted their focus to climate change, aiming to mobilize their followers.
The worrying aspect is that these influencers, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, are introducing new, and often younger, audiences to a plethora of misinformation, undermining efforts to address the climate crisis.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
An aerial image shows destroyed homes and buildings in the aftermath of wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii on August 10, 2023. The fires became a focus point for conspiracies and misinformation online.
Cécile Simmons, a yoga teacher and researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the UK, was taken aback when numerous wellness accounts she followed began discussing climate change. She observed over 150 wellness accounts, most of which had between 10,000 to 100,000 followers, and found that they offered wellness advice, promoted related products, and propagated various forms of misinformation.
The claims she encountered ranged from outright climate denial to attempts to undermine climate solutions by depicting them as part of a global plot for control.
A common theme among these accounts was the emphasis on individual solutions to collective problems, and the selling of wellness as a response to climate anxiety, reflecting a strong sense of individualism coupled with deep distrust of authorities.
Many of these influencers claim to be revealing the truth and operate under the motif of standing up against the establishment, as exemplified by the @truth_crunchy_mama account, whose operator refers to themselves as a “truth teller.”
Some influencers even acknowledge the human-caused climate crisis. Joseph Mercola, the individual behind the @drmercola Instagram account, stated that humans are indeed impacting the environment and climate. When questioned about his remarks on Hawaii’s wildfires, he clarified that he accepts the consensus attributing the fires to dry conditions and strong winds. His climate-related posts often pose questions rather than making definitive claims.
The wellness industry, with varying estimates reaching into the trillions of dollars, has been evolving for decades. Although its modern incarnation dates back to the late 1950s, the movement gained momentum in the 1970s and has diversified with the advent of the internet, now encompassing a wide spectrum of concepts centered around individualism, self-enlightenment, and distrust of institutions – fertile ground for the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
The convergence of wellness and conspiracy thinking, dubbed “pastel QAnon” by researcher Marc-André Argentino to describe the soft, appealing aesthetic used by some influencers, has gained momentum during periods of cultural confusion or tragedy, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and now, the climate crisis.
Influencers are drawn to the relevance of climate change as a prominent and continually relevant issue. Moreover, the shift from vaccine conspiracies to climate conspiracies seems a short ideological leap, driven by the belief that if the establishment is wrong about health, they are also deceptive about climate change.
This shift not only enhances engagement but prolongs the difficulty in altering people’s mindsets, as it becomes tied to belonging to a specific community.
While it may be tempting to dismiss this subset of wellness influencers, their strong bonds with followers cannot be ignored. They excel at creating intimacy and projecting authenticity, forging one-sided connections with their audience, allowing for the dissemination of conspiracy messages to resonate, offering a simplified explanation and enabling individuals to reclaim agency in complex issues like climate change.
The impact of this engagement on real-world actions is challenging to quantify, but experts agree that climate misinformation has undoubtedly influenced people’s beliefs and normalized fringe perspectives. This not only hampers climate solutions but also undermines trust in climate policies, particularly among young people who stand to be misled by such misinformation.
The potential for a significant impact is heightened by the fact that younger generations primarily consume news from platforms like Instagram, making them particularly susceptible to wellness influencers sharing climate disinformation.
According to Mariah Wellman, an assistant professor and wellness expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago, this can lead to young individuals unknowingly accepting inaccurate information due to the sole reliance on wellness influencers for news.
Expanding on this, misinformation expert Tim Caulfield affirmed that acceptance of certain beliefs, including being anti-climate change, becomes a non-negotiable part of being within that community and serves as a means to significantly expand one’s audience.
While it is challenging to change individuals’ mindsets once they become entrenched in a specific ideology, there are strategies to counter misinformation. It is crucial to address misinformation in a respectful and constructive manner, along with implementing “pre-bunking” tactics to expose the tactics used to propagate misinformation.
Those focused on countering misinformation may also seek clarity from platforms hosting these influencers, advocating for measures like bans on amplifying and monetizing content that contradicts climate science.
However, there is a unanimous call for stronger actions and clearer policies from the platforms themselves, with Meta, the owner of Instagram, being urged to take a more proactive stance in tackling misinformation.
As the frequency and severity of extreme weather events intensify due to the climate crisis, there is growing concern over the increasing susceptibility of these sections of the wellness community to climate denial and misinformation, necessitating a more concerted effort to address this pressing issue.
“The dark side of wellness has always been there. It’s just now we see it,” Simmons remarked.
