When wildfire ripped through Hawaii’s Maui last August, the impact was devastating: a whole town reduced to ashes, more than 100 lives lost. The inferno was described as the “largest natural disaster in state history.”
But some on Instagram suggested, without evidence, there was something much more nefarious at play.
Wellness influencer @truth_crunchy_mama told her 37,000 followers to “stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government.” They’re “going to keep setting wildfires until we all submit to their climate change agenda,” she said in another post.
Health influencer @drmercola suggested to his 504,000 followers whether, while the media focused on climate change, the fires might have been deliberately set to “to facilitate a land grab” to make the area a “smart city” — referring to a technology-focused urban design idea.
A natural parenting influencer, whose Instagram page is filled with soft-focus pictures of herself against pretty pastel backgrounds, inferred to her 76,000-strong community that Hawaii’s wildfires were started by “directed energy weapons” — systems which use energy such as laser beams.
These posters are all wellness influencers — a loosely-defined umbrella term for a wide range of accounts including yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health and new age spirituality.
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But for years there has been a merging of wellness, disinformation and conspiracy, as a subset of influencers use the backdrop of aesthetically pleasing, pastel-colored posts to spread much darker messages, weaving together alarming conspiracy theories with calls for users to buy their supplements or services.
This phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, when anti-vax sentiment took hold in large parts of the wellness community. As interest in the pandemic waned, experts say some wellness influencers have latched on to climate change to galvanize followers.
Their concern: Those influencers — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — are exposing new, and younger, audiences to a slew of misinformation and undermining efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
The people that believe this are the real issue
Crazy people always existed, but it takes believers to cause a problem
I dunno, it seems crazy people with reach are the problem. Thats the part that’s new.
Gullible and easily influenced people are not new.
...they said in a culture where nearly a third of humanity believes a dead person came back to life, floated up into the sky, and is one day going to float back down to judge everyone because of the reach a guy rambling on about trumpets and monsters had when he got his book included into an anthology being compiled by the Roman empire.