Health Promotion on Instagram: Descriptive-Correlational Study and Predictive Factors of Influencers' Content.

The pandemic has accentuated the power that influencers have to influence their followers. Various scientific approaches highlight the lack of moral and ethical responsibility of these creators when disseminating content under highly sensitive tags such as health. This article presents a correlational statistical study of 443 Instagram accounts with more than one million followers belonging to health-related categories. This study aims to describe the content of these profiles and their authors and to determine whether they promote health as accounts that disseminate health-related content, identifying predictive factors of their content topics. In addition, it aims to portray their followers and establish correlations between the gender of the self-described health influencers, the characteristics of their audience and the messages that these prescribers share. Health promotion is not the predominant narrative among these influencers, who tend to promote beauty and normative bodies over health matters. A correlation is observed between posting health content, the gender of the influencers and the average age of their audiences. The study concludes with a discussion on the role of public media education and the improvement of ethical protocols on social networks to limit the impact of misleading and false content on sensitive topics, increasing the influence of real health prescribers.

The performance of truth: politicians, fact-checking journalism, and the struggle to tackle COVID-19 misinformation.

Since the World Health Organization (WHO, February 2, 2020) reported that the spread of coronavirus disease has been accompanied by a "massive infodemic," the COVID-19 outbreak has become a national and international battleground of a struggle against misinformation. Fact-checking outlets around the world have been actively counteracting false and misleading information surrounding the pandemic. In this article, we conceptualize fact checkers in terms of the "interpretative power" that journalism holds in processes of political performances (Alexander in Soc Theory 22(4): 527-573, 2004, in: The performance of politics. Obama's victory and the struggle for democratic power. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 2010). Drawing on virus-related fact checks from Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) database, we make two arguments. First, we argue that the new phenomenon of specialized "fact checking" might be considered as a further explicitly differentiated element of Alexander's model of cultural performance, which fulfills a double duty: trying to contribute to further "de-fusion" (separating audiences from actors when the latter lack authenticity and credibility) on the one hand, and working to overcome it on the other. Second, we explain how new fact-checking practices have become a reflexive supplement to the news media of the civil sphere that might be able to help the civil sphere's communicative institutions to defend truthfulness in a manner that contributes to democracy.