How women seeking information about health and wellness are recommended sites that promote election denialism

25 October 2024

This Dispatch highlights how women seeking information about health and wellness topics on Instagram, such as searches on the benefits of “raw milk” or “fitness for women,” are recommended content featuring Turning Point USA spokesperson Alex Clark and her re-branded POPlitics account which now hosts a wellness podcast called “Cultural Apothecary.” Once they interact with Clark’s wellness content, Instagram recommends users follow organizations like Turning Point USA [1] and the Tucker Carlson News Network that promote election-denial and other far-right narratives. This content may serve as an entry point from wellness to narratives associated with the far-right. 

This may be the latest iteration of the intersection of health and conspiracies on social media, following the widespread 2020 trend which joined election deniers with COVID-19 health concerns and conspiracy spaces. It raises questions about platform recommender systems, the significance of platform election policies, and the bait and switch tactics of extreme actors ahead of the 2024 elections.

Methodology  

Researchers conducted an experiment to recreate the experience of an Instagram user actively interested in wellness and health with no prior interest in far-right content. Researchers focused on Meta-owned Instagram, as 59% of women say they are regularly getting news information from Instagram in 2024. They created two Instagram accounts registered as women living in the US to explore whether the platform would suggest different content to users with different health and wellness interests.  

 The account did not “opt-in” to political content; Meta changed Instagram’s settings to opt users out of seeing political content by default in March 2024. This opt-out only applies to Reels and a user’s Explore page, not to accounts users already follow or accounts that are recommended to them on their Home feed.  

One research account then searched for popular wellness and health terms like “raw milk,” “organic,” and “organic skincare” and followed several non-political wellness and health accounts like makingskincareco, milieorganics, thefoodbabe, and voyabeauty to emulate a user interested in said topics. A second account searched for terms such as “exercise routines”, “#fitspo”, “workouts for women” and “nutrition.” 

Results

While searching wellness and health terms, Instagram recommended a video called “food.lies” that tagged Alex Clark’s Instagram account in the caption in the “For You” page. 

After clicking on Clark’s personal account in the caption, which includes a link to Clark’s Cultural Apothecary account (previously POPlitics) in her biography section, researchers were prompted to click on the platform’s “Suggested for you” option on Clark’s main account page. Instagram recommended the Turning Point USA account (TPUSA), as well as those of founder Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson News Network as “Suggested for you”.  

Figure 1: A post from one of the accounts suggested to researchers after following Cultural Apothecary on Instagram

Kirk has previously used his personal accounts and his Turning Point USA organization online apparatus to promote false claims about abortion occurring up until the moment of birth; that non-citizens are taking over residential areas; and claims from election-denying conspiracists around the security of paper ballot-only elections.  

Tucker Carlson News Network regularly features actors such as Jack Posobiec, Alex Jones and Charlie Kirk, who have been linked to election denying and far-right narratives. Carlson has also promoted false claims around Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating residents’ pets and local wildlife by “sacrificing” them, as well as openly questioned if attempts to overthrow the US government are legitimate. 

 In effect, following Clark resulted in Meta’s algorithms immediately suggesting more extreme content to researchers, and almost all recommended accounts had nothing or very little to do with the health and wellness issues researchers originally queried. 

After following Clark’s personal account, Instagram recommended additional TPUSA contributors like Allie Beth Stuckey and Isabel Brown to the research accounts, as well as TPUSA’s main account again. Upon following Culture Apothecary’s account, Instagram recommend political accounts such as pro-life group Let Them Live, conservativemamas, and Morgon McMichael, a TPUSA contributor. All of the TPUSA contributor accounts link back to TPUSA’s main account. 

When researchers then followed TPUSA’s main account, or engage with additional TPUSA accounts, Instagram’s “Suggested for you” feature recommended additional accounts featuring outright election-denying and conspiratorial content. This included accounts like LibsofTikTok, DC Draino (real name Rogan O’Handley), TPUSA contributor Candace Owens, election-denying Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and, once again, the Tucker Carlson News Network. These accounts regularly promote election fraud narratives and other conspiracy theories related to immigration and LGBTQ+ issues.  

LibsofTikTok, an account run by activist Chaya Raichik, has promoted election conspiracy theories and contested narratives reflecting far-right viewpoints. She frequently promotes claims popular on the far-right, such as the false narrative that non–citizens are being purposefully registered to vote or casting ballots, or that migrants are taking over cities and harming US citizens. 

Figure 2: A post from LibsofTikTok featuring a video claiming noncitizens are purposefully being registered to vote by Democrats

Similarly, the account DC_Draino  regularly promotes the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and that Democrats will cheat in the 2024 elections, and disproved claims that paper ballots are the only means by which elections can be conducted securely. 

 The results found by repeating the same research with the second ‘fitness’ Instagram account were nearly identical to the previous experiment: the same far-right or conservative-leaning actors and entities as outlined above were served to the account after arriving to both Clark’s personal page and her Cultural Apothecary page.   

Whilst only offering a snapshot, these two examples illustrate how it takes only a few clicks for an Instagram user interested in health and wellness to be directed to election-denial content and narratives popular on the far right. 

Rebranding toward wellness as a strategy to expand reach? 

It is worth noting that both Clark and her Cultural Apothecary Instagram account channel do not hide their affiliation with Turning Point USA (Cultural Apothecary is “powered by TPUSA” according to the POPlitics Instagram bio). But the most popular Cultural Apothecary content focuses on non-explicitly political ideas like revealing the chemicals in food or the importance of female friendships in one’s 30s.  

 The highest performing videos include parenting videos about:  

  • The benefits of raw milk (1.4M views) 

The Cultural Apothecary account now has 179K followers, well below the reach of these videos, suggesting the wellness content focused on non-political topics is benefitting from an automated boost from the platforms, exposing Clark and her affiliates to a wider audience.   

Cultural Apothecary channels say the podcast is dedicated to “healing a sick culture,” a vague phrase with multiple possible interpretations. While Culture Apothecary’s launch video leads with the statement “health is non-partisan” and empathizes with everyday frustrations such as unhealthy food, it also poses the question “which way Western women?”, echoing a meme with white nationalist origins.

Figure 3: A post from Culture Apothecary that echoes a white nationalist meme

One of Clark’s other videos shared to her account, featuring a clip from her interview with former conservative commentator and Praeger U personality Will Witt, initially appears to be a typical discussion about child rearing. However, in the video, the main claim that arises is the false notion that cartoons can cause children to develop autism. 

Instagram users browsing interest-based content may or may not realize that Cultural Apothecary’s content is not solely apolitical. Engaging with Clark’s content leaves a user (and potential voter) a mere one or two steps away from extreme election-denying content, and narratives popular on the far right, despite no demonstrated interest in those topics. 

Figure 4: A video from the Culture Apothecary podcast in which Clark promotes the claim that a cartoon can cause autism-like behaviors in children

Figure 5: A Culture Apothecary post focused on the health risks from touching receipts, which remains unconfirmed in humans (link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bpa-receipts-major-store-chains-study/)

Conclusion 

Women voters are key in any election, and political activists and organizations have an increasing incentive to reach them as gender gap voting patterns continue to widen. Numerous data sources point to the particularly important role white women in battleground states played in electing Donald Trump in 2016. Six years later, conservatives experienced losses in the 2022 US midterms, in part due to women turning out for Democratic candidates in reaction to Roe vs. Wade being overturned.   

When visiting Clark’s accounts, Instagram users are quickly directed to follow and engage with accounts sharing election conspiracies and promoting election denial. ISD’s research suggests actors associated with far-right narratives are producing ostensibly apolitical content on health and wellness and then benefitting from platform features like Instagram’s account recommendations to introduce their wellness audiences to narratives popular on the far right.    

End Notes

[1] Turning Point USA is a conservative turned far-right youth organizing organization that is mobilizing voters in favor of election-denying candidates. Turning Point and its leader Charlie Kirk have been linked to the financing and coordination of the Stop the Steal movement in depositions given by the movement’s leader, Ali Alexander, and have since designed organizing and fundraising campaigns focused on promoting election fraud disinformation narratives. The group has also hired known extremists, associated with antisemites, and peddled racist conspiracy theories. 

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