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arXiv · 2509.20724

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

Mohammad Reza Zarei·Barbara Stead-Coyle·Michael Christensen·Sarah Everts·Majid Komeili
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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.

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Mohammad Reza Zarei, Barbara Stead-Coyle, Michael Christensen, Sarah Everts, Majid Komeili. 2025-09-25. Visual Authority and the Rhetoric of Health Misinformation: A Multimodal Analysis of Social Media Videos. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20724

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