Abstract:
Health professionals are concerned about how social media influencers, lacking professional training, have become leading players in the provision of health-related knowledge to the public. Such information can be, at best, misleading.  Yet, as scholars have observed, there is still less good understanding of this form of influencer-created, health-related, content and why it is so successful. In this talk I look at some case studies from an ongoing project looking at how leading influencers on a Chinese social media platform, RedNote, provide information for young women about sexual health and STDs as part of their primary aim of marketing a probiotics product for which they are sponsored.  I show how information is formulated in the first place, not on the basis of clear, coherently presented, health issues, but in accordance with configurations of personal concerns, interests and lifestyle issues which are algorithmically identified.  From a health communication perspective what we can learn from this is that a displacement of medical logic is part of the structural feature of influencer-driven health communication.  It may not be simply a matter of supplying ‘correct’ information.

Biography:

David Machin is Professor of Communication, working presently the fields of health communication and in particular nutrition.  Has published across leading journals in the field and has several internationally established text books in multimodality and discourse analysis including Machin, D and Mayr, A. (2023) How to do Critical Discourse Analysis and Machin, D and Ledin, P. (2020) Introduction to Multimodal Analysis.  He is co-editor of Social Semiotics (SSCI-indexed) and sits on the editorial board of all the leading international journals in the field of discourse studies.