Health Influencers on Social Media

Social media have become an important source of health-related information, especially for young people. Everyone can create and share health-related content on social media and some individual users attract large numbers of young followers. Such users are also called influencers because their content has high outreach and can influence the attitudes and behavior of the recipients. The research team is particularly interested in so-called health influencers, influential social media users who post content on health-related topics. These influencers can have a health- promoting effect, for example, when they share evidence-based information and inspire young people for healthy lifestyles. However, they can also have adverse effects on public health when serving commercial interests or sharing misinformation. The project team investigates three key questions in this context: (1) Who are the most prominent health influencers young people engage with? (2) Which health topics are they covering? (3) How does following these health influencers affect adolescents health attitudes and behavior? To identify health influencers, the researchers will initiate a citizen science process with young people. In citizen science, lay citizens perform the roles of professional researchers and engage in different steps of the research process. In this study, school students all over Austria will be invited to engage in a crowdsourcing process. In this process, they screen their digital environments and create a unique database of health influencers, which provides a rich resource for future research. To analyze the content of the identified health influencers, the researchers will conduct a content analysis of their social media accounts and posts. In this content analysis, the health influencers will be characterized on the profile level (e.g., gender, outreach, expertise) and the post level (e.g., topics of the posts, level of evidence, frames). Finally, the research team will implement a longitudinal survey with adolescents to understand the impact of following health influencers on social media. The participants will report which health influencers they are following. The research team will observe how young people who follow certain types of health influencers change their attitudes, knowledge, and behavior over time. Taken together, the project results will provide a holistic perspective on the role of health influencers in young peoples information diets. The researchers will identify key health influencers, open the black box of the content they post and provide first evidence on the impact of following these influencers across time. Based on the results, the research team will derive guidelines to tackle health misinformation and leverage health influencers positive potential in high-choice and personalized media environments.