This article contains spoilers for Apple Cider Vinegar.
The new Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar tells the story of wellness influencer Belle Gibson, who built a loyal following on social media by documenting her cancer journey online. But in 2015, Gibson was exposed as a fraud. She never had cancer, and lied about donating funds to charities and ill children.
The series documents Gibson’s rise to fame and subsequent downfall, portraying some of the psychological factors that influenced her deceit. But this scandal also illustrates a larger story about the conditions that enable cancer frauds such as Gibson to gain credibility and influence online.
The 2000s were characterised by the “blogging revolution” – a shift in how people produced and consumed information. Blogs enabled content creators to share their lives and experiences publicly, and engage directly with their readers. Niche communities formed around common interests ranging from health to heartbreak.
Gibson capitalised on this trend, creating a blog called The Whole Pantry where she documented her alleged journey battling a rare form of terminal brain cancer. She claimed on her blog to have decided to reject conventional cancer treatments.
Instead, Gibson expressed that she was empowered to heal herself naturally through nutrition, determination and love – as well as alternative medicine including Ayurvedic treatments, craniosacral therapy, oxygen therapy and colonics.
The blog was developed into an app in 2013 and a book in 2014 – with Gibson’s story being legitimised by a reputable publisher and brands, then further fuelled by her social media presence.
Gibson’s primary platform of communication was Instagram. She used the photo-and-video sharing app to build and engage with her followers through inspirational quotes, personal anecdotes and evocative photographs. Lifestyle and wellness influencers typically earn trust and intimacy by presenting themselves as authentic, accessible – and autonomous from state and corporate interests.
A quote from Gibson’s book, also called The Whole Pantry, encapsulates the way she executed this strategy to appeal to online followers. She wrote: “Too many people over-edit themselves. There’s not enough honesty out there. It’s human to feel sick, to ask questions, to search for answers … Never refine yourself in a way which takes away your heart, message and truest self.”
This persona allowed Gibson not only to achieve fame online, but to establish a parasocial relationship with her followers by distancing herself from the medical establishment, appearing relatable and unfiltered in her exchanges with followers.
The mass media has long been recognised as facilitating parasocial relationships: emotional and imaginary bonds that, despite feeling real, tend to be one-dimensional and one-sided. The original parasocial relationships were formed with media figures such as news anchors, radio hosts, and film and pop stars.
Today, content creators on social media are the primary influencers. Although these relationships are typically one-sided, they can still feel intimate and real.
The role of the wellness industry
In the aftermath of the scandal, people searched for who to blame. Fingers were pointed at the press for glamorising Gibson, as well as a publisher and other companies that failed to adequately fact-check Gibson’s claims.
Criticism was also directed at the wellness industry for peddling misinformation and pseudoscience.
There’s an assumption that wellness is mainly a female pursuit – and the Netflix series follows several female wellness influencers who have built brands around their illness and disease.
In fact, the gendered dimensions of wellness are more complicated. The original founders of the wellness movement were male. Although many struggled to commodify wellness, they increasingly tapped into a market of women, many of whom felt justifiably unheard and overlooked by health professionals.
There’s an irony that Gibson’s wellness brand went by the Instagram handle “healing_belle”. Part of the success of the wellness industry today is derived from promising miracle cures and remedies for various forms of illness and disease. Many wellness influencers have built successful brands by commodifying health and wellbeing.
This is a far cry from the movement’s origins and the more positive conception of health they sought to establish – which aimed to operate in conjunction with medicine, rather than against it.
Gibson rose to fame in a climate of low institutional trust, where her lived experience was valued over institutional expertise. Similar to many alt-health influencers, her suspicion of conventional medicine resulted in controversial claims about vaccination, and the benefits of Gerson therapy – a regimen that claims to cure cancer through a special diet, supplements and enemas – and raw milk.
It was by documenting the negative side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in her book that Gibson was able to present her lifestyle and lived experience as a hopeful alternative path to healing.
After she was convicted of misleading and deceptive conduct in 2017 and ordered by the Federal Court of Australia to pay a fine of AUS$410,000 (£206,000), one might have expected to see a decrease in cancer frauds, given the global publicity this scandal attracted.
Instead, other high-profile cases of content creators peddling cancer misinformation on short video platforms have emerged at an alarming rate – often using social media to monetise fake miracle cures, from apricot kernels to soursop tea.
Short-form video platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have changed the dynamics of fame. Algorithms are central to the user experience on these apps, allowing relatively unknown content creators to gain visibility and attention online.
Whereas Gibson spent years cultivating a following online, today a content creator with only a handful of followers can upload an engaging video and achieve millions of views.
The technologies have changed, but there is an industry of content creators profiting from misleading and harmful advice. The prevalence of cancer misinformation online highlights that the problem runs much deeper than the case of Gibson, as told in Apple Cider Vinegar.
