Affective Authority: Understanding Health and Wellness Influence on Social Media

Health and wellness content has become increasingly popular on social media. When examining why this content resonates with certain viewers, existing research often turns to concepts of authenticity, credibility, trust, expertise, and authority. In this article, we map out existing work on these concepts across an extensive body of interdisciplinary scholarship within media, communication, and cultural studies, and the anthropology of health, media, and medicine. By analyzing how these theories relate to one another, we offer synthesized definitions of them within the context of digital health content. We then make the case that this existing work too often fails to acknowledge the relationality, mediatedness, and affective qualities associated with health and wellness influencers and their content. To combat this, we offer the theoretical intervention of “affective authority,” which encourages an attunement to how affect, emotions, and feelings emerge through the production and consumption of social media content. We argue that this concept of “affective authority” better illuminates how and why wellness influencers and their content are deemed authoritative arbiters of health-related knowledge.