How health influencers use algorithms to create discourses: Distorting medical information for niche marketing groups

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 paper, using critical discourse analysis, we explore 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. 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. We show that a displacement of medical logic is part of the structural feature of influencer-driven health communication.