As social media increasingly plays host to health content, there is a growing body of scholarship considering how the parasocial trust relationships developed between audiences and social media influencers, might influence their audience’s health. This paper aims to extend the literature in this field by interrogating the workings and impact of social media health influencer (SMHI) cultures using the lens of Actor-Network Theory to explore the connections between influencers, platforms, and audiences.

Drawing on data from the first two phases of a four-phase mixed methods study which utilised the Walkthrough Method and Netnography.

Initial findings point to concerns over the portrayal of qualifications among health influencers. Whilst previous literature suggests that healthcare workers should be present in social media spaces to provide clarity and dispel health misinformation, the early findings suggest that although qualification is used as a method of garnering audience trust, qualifications do not necessarily ensure the health influencer is sharing evidence-based health information. The data identified SMHIs frequently presenting online courses as professional health qualifications, using qualifications to elicit trust in health information without an evidence-base, or sharing health information which is outside of the scope of their qualification and training. with some leveraging online courses as professional credentials, potentially leading to misinformation. These findings call into question the effectiveness of strategies that prioritize healthcare professionals as a solution to misinformation.

This paper presents findings from an ongoing project focused on sober curious communities on TikTok. In this paper I argue that these communities offer a haven from in ‘intoxigenic’ digital spaces for individuals navigating the complexities of sobriety.

This research examines the implications of TikTok's emergence as a locus of sociality for the sober curious movement, both in terms of individual well-being and broader societal attitudes towards addiction and recovery. Central to this is an exploration of the creative and expressive practices employed by individuals within sober curious communities and the attitudes and experiences of those who follow them.

The paper draws on qualitative data from interviews with 28 sober curious TikTok users and a systematic content analysis of 800 TikTok videos.

Emergent findings reveal insights into the role of TikTok in destigmatizing addiction, fostering empathy and promoting positive representations of abstinence and resilience.

Three key themes with be explored: the value of digital storytelling, the nature of TikTok accountability, and the visibility of failures or relapses. These themes underscore TikTok's significance as a platform for personal expression, accountability, and community-building within the sober curious movement.

Combined, these themes speak to TikTok as an important platform for the sober curious. TikTok allows the messy, unpredictable, embodied and digital practices and experiences of sobriety to play out. Reframing sobriety beyond medicalised narratives of addiction to provide a more nuanced and freeing set of practices and contexts that enable respondents to rethink and re-evaluate their relationship with alcohol.

According to social media users’ comments, the recent increase in social media content detailing the symptoms and experiences of living with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has led to many users self-diagnosing with the disorder. This conference paper presents the findings of an 18-month-long digital ethnographic study in which I analyzed ADHD TikTok videos and the technological infrastructures and assemblages surrounding the TikTok app, to interrogate how TikTok has become a voice of authority in the self-diagnosis of ADHD. This paper demonstrates how ADHD TikTok content creators create videos that cultivate sentiments of trust, intimacy, and relatability. These creators also adopt visual and discursive norms from other trending TikTok content, and from more traditional visual media content. In doing so, ADHD content creators generate authority by conforming and contributing to a set of coproduced content standards that ensure their videos are deemed viewable and relevant by viewers and the algorithm. Contrary to traditional understandings of authority, I find that medical authority on TikTok is not produced by individuals or institutions, but rather by content creators’ collective and collaborative performativity of everyday lived experiences, and their engagement with the supporting technologies of the TikTok app. To account for this shift in how authority is produced in our digital mediascape, I build on theories of social, cultural, and algorithmic authority, to offer a theoretical framework of ‘techno-cultural authority’. I ultimately argue that the techno-cultural authority of ADHD TikTok challenges customary understandings of authority figures and disrupts traditional medical expertise within the American healthcare industry.

Research exploring identity performance on Tiktok has highlighted a departure from older self-making frameworks - such as the networked self- and a move towards a more ‘algorithmized’ version of self-making online. This departure takes us from a framework that emphasises performance in the Goffmanian sense to a model that emphasises the role of the algorithm in shaping our identity practices. Social media platforms, though, have been established as important spaces for the performance health and illness identities. With this in mind, this paper asks whether and how illness performances occur on Tiktok and further explores the extent to which we are departing from more traditional self-making practices.

To do this, we draw on findings from an ongoing Leverhulme Trust-funded project focused on social media uses relevant to hereditary cancer syndromes. These syndromes mark health conditions linked to known genetic mutations, also called “cancer genes”, that heighten the risk of having cancer from an early age. Carriers of these genetic mutations are often referred to as ‘previvors’: healthy individuals who are coping with the awareness of having a genetic predisposition to cancer. We used computational techniques to access posts about two hereditary cancer syndromes: BRCA 1/2 and Lynch Syndrome published on TikTok followed by a qualitative content analysis. From this, our initial findings show how strong elements of older identity frameworks remain present in content produced by previvors on TikTok with previvors identity performances remaining very much networked, interactive and connected to specific communities.