Picazo-Sánchez, L.; Domínguez-Martín, R.; García-Marín, D. Health Promotion on Instagram: Descriptive–Correlational Study and Predictive Factors of Influencers’ Content. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2022, 19, 15817.
Picazo-Sánchez, L.; Domínguez-Martín, R.; García-Marín, D. Health Promotion on Instagram: Descriptive–Correlational Study and Predictive Factors of Influencers’ Content. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 15817.
Picazo-Sánchez, L.; Domínguez-Martín, R.; García-Marín, D. Health Promotion on Instagram: Descriptive–Correlational Study and Predictive Factors of Influencers’ Content. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health2022, 19, 15817.
Picazo-Sánchez, L.; Domínguez-Martín, R.; García-Marín, D. Health Promotion on Instagram: Descriptive–Correlational Study and Predictive Factors of Influencers’ Content. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 15817.
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Influencer; Instagram; health promotion; followers; social media; fake content; media education
Subject
Social Sciences, Education
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.