Résumé
Background: Social media is popular for sharing exercise content such as fitness inspiration under various hashtags including “fitspo” or “fitsporation”. It is also an opportunity for false information to circulate rapidly, disguised as informative content. The FLICC Framework identifies misinformation as messages containing at least one of five constructs: Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, or Conspiracy theories.
Purpose: To apply the FLICC Framework for misinformation to popular fitness inspiration posts found on Instagram, and explore whether these media fit a misinformation profile.
Methods: A systematic sample of 120 Instagram posts + accompanying biographies were collected, searching “fitsporation”; 100 posts met inclusion criteria. Two researchers coded 33% of the data with excellent agreement for all five FLICC constructs, all Intraclass Correlations ≥0.87, 95% CI [.87, .97], p< .001. The primary coder completed remaining posts independently.
Results: There was a statistically significant difference in the number of posts that contained at least one FLICC construct for misinformation, x2(1) = 9.00, p=.03; 35 posts contained no misinformation, 65 posts did contain misinformation. Posts with 5 misinformation constructs were most prevalent, found in 14% of the posts. Cherry picking, x2(1) = 5.76, p=.02 and conspiracy theories x2(1) = 92.16, p<.01 were observed the least.
Discussion: Fitness inspiration content is likely to contain at least some element of misinformation, containing logical fallacies and impossible expectations, presented by fake experts. This may help to explain negative influences to mood state and body objectification, seen in prior work.
