The recent BBC report on the death of 23-year-old Paloma Shemirani, who refused chemotherapy for a treatable cancer, offers a devastating example of how conspiracy theories – amplified and legitimised online – can cost lives. Her brothers have courageously spoken out, placing blame not only on their mother’s extreme anti-medicine beliefs but on the broader ecosystem that allowed those views to flourish unchecked. Their plea is simple: no one else should have to die like Paloma did.
This story is not just a personal tragedy – it reflects the systemic failure of our digital health information landscape. As I’ve argued in both my book, The Digital Health Self (2023), and my Anthropology & Medicine journal article, (In)visibility of Health and Illness: Instagram as an Unregulated Public Health Platform (2024), we are living through a credibility crisis in health communication – one shaped by platform capitalism, emotional visibility, and the absence of meaningful regulation.
Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X are now de facto health information infrastructures. They are where millions turn for advice, validation, and visibility, whether that’s through influencer wellness tips or self-tracked recovery journeys. But these platforms do not prioritise clinical accuracy. Instead, they operate within what I call the attention economy of health: a system where emotional resonance, aesthetic appeal, and algorithmic virality dictate what rises to the top. Credibility is no longer grounded in medical training or peer-reviewed science but in follower counts and engagement metrics.
Paloma’s story illustrates this painfully. Her mother's beliefs were not confined to fringe blogs; they were part of a growing online health subculture that equates medical rejection with empowerment, and natural remedies with moral purity. These beliefs gain traction because they feel emotionally true, are framed as stories of self-reclamation and survival, and because platforms reward this type of content. In my research, I’ve shown how health and illness are performed online in ways that prioritise visibility, productivity, and moral worth. The result is a distorted credibility arena where influencers can market unproven therapies to millions with little oversight.
And this is the heart of the problem: there is no regulation. Instagram, for example, functions as an informal but powerful public health platform. Yet, unlike the NHS, WHO, or any clinical body, it is not held to any standard of evidence, harm prevention, or ethical health communication. In the post-pandemic era, where lay users increasingly self-manage, self-diagnose, and share their own health content, we are seeing an alarming shift: platform visibility is mistaken for legitimacy. In this unregulated space, misinformation thrives – and lives like Paloma’s are lost.
This crisis also cannot be separated from broader neoliberal pressures. As I detail in my work, individuals are now expected to perform health not only for their own wellbeing but for public display – proving their virtue, discipline, and self-responsibility through ‘Instagrammable bodies’ and behaviours. In this context, rejecting chemotherapy may even appear, paradoxically, as an act of radical autonomy – a way to reclaim control in a world where health has been commodified and moralised.
But this is not empowerment. It is the product of a broken system. If social media platforms continue to profit from health misinformation without regulatory intervention, we will see more deaths like Paloma’s. We urgently need systemic change: robust regulation of health content, transparent algorithms, accountability for influencers, and digital literacy strategies that go beyond fact-checking to address the emotional and aesthetic dimensions of misinformation.
Paloma’s death is a tragedy. It is also a warning. If we continue to allow unregulated health misinformation to thrive online, more lives will be lost. Rebuilding trust in evidence-based medicine will take more than banning posts. It requires confronting the emotional, cultural, and algorithmic forces that shape how we come to believe what we believe about our bodies and our health.
It’s time we stop pretending social media is just a mirror of society. It’s a megaphone. And when that megaphone amplifies false hope over real science, the cost can be devastating.