Visual Authority and the Rhetoric of Health Misinformation: A Multimodal Analysis of Social Media Videos

2025-09-24

AI Summary

This study investigates how health misinformation in social media short videos evades public scrutiny through “credibility packaging,” particularly in nutrition and dietary supplement content. Employing a transparent multimodal mixed-methods approach—integrating automatic speech recognition, systematic frame sampling, vision-language joint modeling, and expert human validation—we annotated and analyzed 152 cross-platform videos. Results reveal that authority cues (e.g., white coats, laboratory backdrops) are frequently decontextualized from authentic clinical settings and co-occur with emotionally charged narratives and commercial rhetoric. Scientific representations are systematically diluted—not reinforced—by affective and adversarial framing. The key contribution is the first systematic integration of visual authority signals with rhetorical strategies, empirically uncovering the mechanisms underlying “pseudo-professionalism.” Findings provide actionable insights for platform governance and evidence-informed media literacy interventions. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Visual, Multimedia & Multimodal Data

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation
• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis

Abstract

Short form video platforms are central sites for health advice, where alternative narratives mix useful, misleading, and harmful content. Rather than adjudicating truth, this study examines how credibility is packaged in nutrition and supplement videos by analyzing the intersection of authority signals, narrative techniques, and monetization. We assemble a cross platform corpus of 152 public videos from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and annotate each on 26 features spanning visual authority, presenter attributes, narrative strategies, and engagement cues. A transparent annotation pipeline integrates automatic speech recognition, principled frame selection, and a multimodal model, with human verification on a stratified subsample showing strong agreement. Descriptively, a confident single presenter in studio or home settings dominates, and clinical contexts are rare. Analytically, authority cues such as titles, slides and charts, and certificates frequently occur with persuasive elements including jargon, references, fear or urgency, critiques of mainstream medicine, and conspiracies, and with monetization including sales links and calls to subscribe. References and science like visuals often travel with emotive and oppositional narratives rather than signaling restraint.

Problem

• Analyzing how credibility is constructed in nutrition supplement videos
• Examining intersection of authority signals, narrative techniques and monetization
• Investigating multimodal persuasion strategies in health misinformation videos

Innovation

• Multimodal analysis of authority signals and narratives
• Transparent annotation pipeline with human verification
• Cross-platform corpus analysis of persuasive techniques