Responses to (Un)healthy advice: Processing and acceptance of health content creators’ nutrition misinformation by youth

Health information, particularly about nutrition, has flourished on social media in recent years. However, these claims often lack proper scrutiny enhancing the risk of misinformation. Nutrition misinformation on social media can originate from various sources including influencers, celebrities, and (freelance) journalists, who often have substantial reach. We conducted a between-subjects experiment, manipulating presence of misinformation and source type (influencer/celebrity/journalist), among N = 480 youth aged 16-22 years. We investigated how nutrition misinformation affects their nutrition (mis)beliefs and dieting. We also tested the moderating role of participants' issue involvement and the mediating role of the sources' perceived expertise. We found that youth remained largely unaffected by nutrition misinformation. However, perceived source expertise acted as a heuristic cue to determine trust in an unknown health content creator. This perceived expertise, in turn, increased perceived healthiness of food products mentioned by the 'expert' content creator regardless of misinformation exposure.