Downlining Disinformation: How MLM Distributors Use Gendered Strategies for Recruitment and Pastel QAnon Indoctrination

Abstract

doTERRA and Young Living are multi-level marketing (MLM) companies sustained by distribution networks of women who sell their trademark essential oil products. We argue that women join essential oil MLMs based on an iterative, three-pronged strategy that not only recruits women as oil distributors but also simultaneously indoctrinates them to pastel QAnon conspiracy spaces: digitally driven, feminized realms situated at the nexus of New Age spirituality, wellness, and far-right ideologies. MLM distributors first compel women to look toward essential oils as a viable medical intervention by leveraging potential recruits’ distrust with medical establishments and hardship produced by intersecting structural inequalities (classism, racism, ableism, sexism). Women are then hooked in by promises of essential oils offering silver-bullet solutions to complex problems stemming from inequitable social systems. Finally, women get downlined into pastel QAnon disinformation flows through algorithmic production of confirmation bias. By coding qualitative data of MLM distributors and pastel QAnon influencers for digital content analysis, we identify socio-cultural and gendered trends of disinformation production at the intersections of wellness, pastel QAnon, and structural inequalities. These findings provide insights into the seductive appeal of disinformation beyond the textual content of the message and contribute to our understanding of the larger political economy of incentives and rewards that perpetuate disinformation-for-hire communities.

“If you think anti-vaxxers are crazy, you haven’t gone down the wormhole enough, and you haven’t done enough research.”—Young Living distributor and YouTube influencer Nikki Phillipi

With the emergence of COVID-19, many women have taken to social media to find community and solutions to their social isolation and political, economic, and social uncertainty as they face the added burden of increased care work, domestic work, and financial burdens. Essential oils multi-level marketing (MLM) companies such as doTERRA and Young Living use unresearched claims of essential oils as a proven COVID-19 intervention in their digital recruitment tactics. Mainly, women of faith find these companies’ promises of financial success, personal empowerment, community, and health and wellness alluring because they do not require that they trade-off their roles as traditional wives, stay-at-home mothers, and godly citizens (Pavelko & Barker, 2022).

Research has shown that the online wellness community has been closely connected with conspirituality beliefs contending that groups of nefarious elites are controlling the world and that a global shift toward an awakened worldview can overcome them (Baker, 2020, 2022; Ward & Voas, 2011). Since COVID-19, scholars have paid particular attention to social media’s role in perpetuating QAnon disinformation (see Baker, 2022; Chia et al., 2021; Marwick & Partin, 2022). However, the connection between essential oil MLM recruitment and QAnon is undertheorized. Hence, this study contributes to understanding the social conditions and identities that inform the political economy of incentivized disinformation production and its consumption (Ong & Cabañes, 2019).

Using case studies of two essential oil companies’ distributors, doTERRA and Young Living, this study investigates essential oil distributors’ strategies to spread disinformation. We find that essential oil distributors employ an iterative, three-pronged gendered disinformation strategy on social media to simultaneously recruit new women into the MLM business and indoctrinate them into conspirituality theories like Pastel QAnon: The Look, The Hook, and the Disinformation Downline. Distributors create social media videos and posts that exploit potential new sellers’ fears of continued financial instability, health anxieties, and aspirations toward discovering supportive communities amid dynamics of social isolation. They obscure how structures of inequality impact consumers’ lived experiences by using affective appeals to entice potential followers to look to them for answers to women’s desire for empowerment within their homes, ability to take care of children with disabilities, and the capacity to generate economic stability. Distributors then hook new sellers, comforting them with promises that essential oils are the answer to the forces of sexism, ableism, and classism that produce the social conditions which create visceral feelings of anxiety, frustration, loneliness, and distrust. Finally, distributors encourage recruits to “research” these claims by instructing them in how to trick the algorithms into producing confirmation bias that feeds into disinformation about conspirituality theories such as Pastel QAnon’s “Save the children” and anti-vaccination propaganda. This fosters the Disinformation Downline, a gendered pipeline for radicalization that encourages the new recruits to share what they “learned” with others.

We argue that disinformation scholars can no longer take for granted the normative position that these potential recruits should trust health institutions and mainstream media in monitoring medical misinformation and COVID-19 reporting more broadly. Disinformation studies must investigate both the pyramid-like economic model of disinformation campaigns and the social and cultural contexts that inspire people to produce and consume it. Disinformation influencers are successful in perpetuating medical disinformation due to their audiences’ distrust in medical and government institutions. This distrust is brought about by structural inequalities and health injustices, which provokes some to invest in conspiracy thinking. Hence, the spread of online medical disinformation is not a simple matter of presenting scientific evidence through higher authorities. We must begin to examine the intersectionally gendered recruitment tactics that potential followers find appealing, trace their appeal back to their gendered, racialized, classed, and ableist structural inequalities that recruits across different social network nodes experience, and address them. By examining the political economy of disinformation, we can understand how social marginalization and systemic inequalities that create precarity across different communities can drive its production and incentivize dissemination mechanisms.

Conspirituality and Social Media

The internet and social media platforms are fertile ground for conspiracy theories and disinformation. The combination of the internet architecture, such as racist algorithms, search engines, problematic platform moderation, and connectivity speeds (Noble, 2018; Stern, 2021, 2022) along with the variety of human social interactions using compelling visuals, video, memes, and repositories of information allow people with extreme views and beliefs to connect and find community (Tufekci, 2018). Therefore, social media and the internet contribute to the dissemination of conspiracy theories and disinformation in physically situated spaces, such as the 6 January Capitol Riot (Dreisbach et al., 2022) and school board meetings (Collins, 2020), as well as digital ones, like the wellness community (Chia et al., 2021).

For example, one in five Americans believes in the core tenets of the QAnon conspirituality (Huff, 2022). Conspirituality refers to New Age spiritual conspiracy theories that claim a select group of powerful elites with evil intentions secretly run the world and that only a societal awakening and reckoning can conquer these nefarious forces (Ward & Voas, 2011). In 2017, an anonymous 4chan user named “Q” claimed that he was a high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer. His posts claimed that there was a group of left-leaning elites operating a global child sex trafficking ring that former U.S. President Donald Trump was trying to thwart. The far-right fringe “Q” subscribers eventually coalesced into QAnon. One belief that emerged is that the left-leaning elites were part of a Satanic cannibalistic cult who drank children’s blood to maintain their youth. As the COVID-19 pandemic began, an ideological subset of QAnon circulated the idea that the cabal designed the COVID vaccine to sterilize, sicken, or surveil the general population, especially children (Sy & Nagy, 2022).

Some scholars argue that the internet’s infrastructure creates an ideal environment for conspirituality theories to flourish. Chia et al. (2021) suggest the internet, as a network structured for personalized information transmission, provides a spectrum of statistics, selective information, and individualized appeal that perverts knowledge in exchange for “a personalized sense of control and comfort.” Algorithmic searches and newsfeeds coupled with the sheer amount of content provide the illusion that well-being is a matter of accessing the “correct” knowledge, which “feels” true. Therefore, conspirituality can masquerade as hidden truth. Indeed a tagline of QAnon is “do your own research,” which can lead individuals to mine for “proof” and generate a strong selection bias of content thanks to the algorithms (McLaughlin, 2021).

Others place primacy on adherents’ lived experiences of socio-economic inequalities and local histories that draw them in (Drążkiewicz, 2022; Marwick & Partin, 2022; McLaughlin, 2021). The erosion of public trust in institutions of government, medicine, science, and academia, along with personal lived experiences, can make conspirituality more appealing (McLaughlin, 2021). Those who feel disenfranchised reject elites’ “authoritative expertise” in favor of “homegrown” knowledge generated and consumed by similar others (Marwick & Partin, 2022).

Authorities are often baffled by the rapidly increasing popularity of QAnon and COVID anti-vaccination content within large pockets of the U.S. public. Their attempts to forestall disinformation through the dissemination of government public service announcements, mainstream media network fact-checking, and peer-reviewed research by the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization are only marginally successful. Scholars and policymakers take for granted the normative position that the audience should trust health institutions and mainstream media in monitoring medical misinformation and COVID-19 reporting more broadly. Drążkiewicz (2022) argues that debunking conspiracy theories and disinformation is more about understanding subscribers’ experiences of structural inequalities and cultural context than presenting factual information. Institutions trying to counter conspiracy theories must be aware of and address these issues within their campaigns and facts to succeed (Drążkiewicz, 2022). Policymakers have a better opportunity to thwart disinformation campaigns when they understand the larger political economy around the production of disinformation and its allure to its audiences.

We draw on the aforementioned theoretical insights to explore the nuances of indoctrination into QAnon and the belief in Covid vaccine disinformation. We argue that scholars must take a nuanced look at who is adhering to conspirituality theories, why, where they are getting their disinformation, and how that space actively perpetuates the chain of conspiracy theories. We approach disinformation work as a “culture of production” (Ong & Cabañes, 2019), which focuses our attention on the social identities and economic motivations of disinformation producers and their consumers who are drawn to their messages. Thus, there is no single “cause” or remedy for disinformation. Instead, we must investigate how systemic inequalities intersect with different groups of people and see how disinformation is constructed as a form of relief to them. In the following section, we explore one subset of the population.

“Do I have something for ‘Q’ou”: Wellness MLMs and Pastel QAnon

The wellness community on social media has facilitated women’s indoctrination to Pastel QAnon (Heřmanová, 2022; Remski, 2021). Pastel QAnon refers to gendered online aesthetics, branding, and messaging regarding women’s empowerment, purpose, and motherhood that entices women into the movement (Argentino, 2021). Nevertheless, scholars have carefully documented the wellness community’s link to conspirituality long before COVID-19 and QAnon (see McLaughlin, 2021; Ward & Voas, 2011). Other researchers have also studied the gendered recruitment strategies of women into MLM operations, businesses that use direct person-to-person methods to sell their products. There is little systematic research demonstrating how MLM distributors contribute to the indoctrination of women into QAnon and the similarities between the two, aside from a few popular journalistic pieces (see Tiffany, 2020a, 2020b).

Pastel QAnon (Argentino, 2021) and wellness MLMs (Kreydatus, 2005; Pavelko & Barker, 2022) attract primarily white, socially conservative, religious women. The essence of the attraction is that they exploit the social and economic precarity of women and the gendered and racialized conservative fears around children’s safety, specifically white children’s safety, through online campaigns such as QAnon’s #SaveTheChildren (Buntain et al., 2022) and MLM charitable events such as Feed My Starving Children or child sexual assault prevention fundraisers (Pavelko & Barker, 2022; Wrenn & Waller, 2021). They feed into the gendered political discourses that have historically pressured mothers into seeing themselves solely responsible for procuring all the resources necessary to keep their children safe and protected from powerful others who wish to harm them. Even before the Covid pandemic, “warrior-hero” tropes construct mothers with children with disabilities as “doing battle” to obtain interventions for them within an ableist, sexist medical system (Blum, 2007, p. 206; Sousa, 2011). Correspondingly, conservative “mama grizzlies” (Sparks, 2015) must ferociously protect their children’s futures against liberal values and governments.

As the pandemic ensued, women began facing ever higher amounts of unpaid care work, economic precarity, healthcare resource deficits, restricted movements, and for many, an increasing amount of gender-based violence (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, 2020). Social isolation measures that halted in-person gatherings, including religious services and fellowship, exacerbated feelings of loneliness, burden, and purposelessness, especially for mothers of children with special needs (Laslo-Roth et al., 2022; Schnabel et al., 2020). Thus, religiously conservative women bound by their rigid family gender roles felt increasingly anxious about their mothering abilities to protect their children’s health and mistrustful of the government and the medical community as neither were able to contain the virus (Bracewell, 2021). Consequently, digital space and social media, where QAnon and MLM communities congregate, became a place to seek different avenues of comfort, answers, and community in a time of uncertainty.

Pastel QAnon and wellness MLM communities have similar designs and talking points to appeal to potential online recruits. Pastel QAnon social media content often contains pastel palettes in its online branding, along with soft, cursive fonts, glittery gifs, and aspirational memes, which gives women the impression that they are among positive female friends (Heřmanová, 2022). Filled with a variety of inspirational and spiritual sayings (Tiffany, 2020b), its social media networks encourage recruits to perform “affective labor” (Hardt, 1999) or emotion work on behalf of the cause. Similarly, wellness MLMs’ websites and social media also use feminine color schemes, inspirational photos, and positive sayings to bring in new distributors (Pavelko & Barker, 2022). Online candid photos of women at company events who are selling, socializing, and “having fun” while earning imply that positive women business partners and friends await recruits (Pavelko & Barker, 2022).

The two also draw on pseudo-religious messages, socially conservative gender norms, and family values. MLMs woo religious women to join the organization, inspire their allegiance, and reduce their skepticism using religiously coded messages of neoliberal post-feminist empowerment, faith, and activism (Lynch, 1996; Pavelko & Barker, 2022; Perri & Brody, 2011; Wrenn & Waller, 2021). The MLM constructs itself as an individualistic panacea for women’s problems without addressing the structural inequalities that make such problems so. They promise women that they can be part of a “higher purpose” through online consumer activism and individual agency without sacrificing their roles as wives and mothers (Lamoreaux, 2013; Monroe, 2017). Likewise, Pastel QAnon uses pseudo-religious messaging to simplify the systemic inequalities underpinning adherents’ lives through creating a monolith monster (i.e., the “Satanic cabal”). Its post-feminist rhetoric encourages women to be stewards of the sanctity of the home and protectors of children, which emphasizes individual empowerment (Mikkelsen & Kornfield, 2021; Pavelko & Barker, 2022). This is evident in QAnon slogans like “where we go one, we go all” (emphasis added) and the belief that one individual, namely, Donald Trump, can remedy the injustice. Influencers encourage women’s consumer activism to be “digital soldiers” (Sommer, 2020) through donations, viewership, online subscriptions, and social media campaign organizing (Sommer, 2020).

We examine the similarities in the business models, recruitment strategies, and allure of disinformation influencers and wellness distributors that facilitate cross-pollination across communities. In particular, we investigate how some wellness distributors use downlining strategies and anti-vaccination disinformation to simultaneously garner recruits to the business and influence others toward indoctrination into Pastel QAnon. There are two ways the MLM salesforce, also known as distributors, can make a commission. Distributors can sell their products directly to retail customers who are non-participating MLM members and by bringing recruits into the business or “downlining” (Wrenn & Waller, 2021). Downlining is the most profitable selling strategy because the original distributor (or “the upline”) garners a percentage of their recruits’ sales as well as their recruits’ subsequent generations of new members’ sales (Pavelko & Barker, 2022). The Pastel QAnon influencer who is a devout believer and the wellness MLM distributor who happens to dabble in misinformation and conspirituality are often sharply dichotomized. Observers can construct the latter as passive consumers and regurgitators of disinformation to sell products. At the same time, others may see the former as actively pushing disinformation to indoctrinate others. This study blurs this dichotomy. Metaphorically, all influencers and distributors need to downline to achieve their recruitment, outreach, and success goals.

Method

Our case study focuses on doTERRA and Young Living, two well-known essential oils MLM companies, to investigate MLM companies and their distributors as entry points for extrapolating larger socio-cultural and gendered trends of disinformation production at the intersections of wellness, pastel QAnon, and structural inequalities. Our data come from a variety of social media sources affiliated with each MLM from the years of 2018 and 2022, which include social media posts from Twitter and Instagram, personal blog sites, YouTube videos, and podcast interviews with doTERRA and Young Living essential oils distributors. We identified this media through both researching featured distributors that doTERRA and Young Living reposted on their company Twitters, Instagrams, and podcasts, and through Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube hashtag searches for keywords “#doTERRA and #YoungLiving.” To be included within the data, all posts must feature firsthand narrativization by distributors about their direct selling experiences with doTERRA and Young Living. In other words, distributors or company members who actually speak firsthand about their own experiences. This means that we may include excerpts from an online documentary or interview if the distributor is present in the clip. Newspaper articles that discussed the movement without any quotes from distributors would not be included under this criterion.

We then conducted a content analysis from the data collected. As distributors shared their insights, we examined recruitment strategies for both MLM companies’ dissemination of disinformation and potential links between recruitment and disinformation that channeled recruits into Pastel QAnon. We created thematic coding schemas to identify key patterns reflective of distributors’ common ideological standpoints, personal stories, as well as broader professional and political objectives. We first open-coded digital content gathered through doTERRA and Young Living reposts and specified hashtag searches, and then moved in closed-coding thematic content after identifying coherent and consistent subject matter. To that end, we noted key themes woven throughout the compelling formations that motivated and structured our analysis. These themes included distributors’ experiences with rigidly patriarchal domestic environments, distrust of medical/health establishments and governmental institutions often stemming from structural ableism, sexism, and racism, affective connections to reinforcing inequitable gender roles (such as finding one’s primary purpose in care work), and algorithmic bias that favored exposure to disinformation at the intersections of wellness and conspiracy thinking.

In the following section, we discuss the iterative and gendered process of disinformation downlining for disinformation influencers-for-hire: The look, the hook, and the disinformation downline. Although the steps within the process are not discrete categories, we discuss them as such to help scholars untangle the underlying mechanism driving disinformation, radicalization, and recruitment within the MLM wellness community.

The Look

The Look is a crucial step among essential oil distributors and disinformation influencers. For recruitment into disinformation campaigns to be successful, the consumer must become vested in the message and the messenger. As influencers of disinformation campaigns (Ong & Cabañes, 2019), these influencers need to be competitive, even among those within their own team, since a competitive system of “reach” and engagement of social media posts structures rewards and compensation. Similarly, we observed that MLM distributors also recognize this competition among their peers as others are trying to sell the same product. doTERRA and Young Living distributors who can most successfully appeal to potential new sellers’ fears and channel them toward discovering supportive communities amid dynamics of social isolation are more successful at getting new viewers’ attention. Like other studies, the distributors that we observed artfully use affective appeals to viewers’ anxieties surrounding women’s desire for empowerment within their homes (Mikkelsen & Kornfield, 2021; Pavelko & Barker, 2022), ability to take care of children with disabilities (Schnabel et al., 2020), and the capacity to generate economic stability function as a primary selling point for getting women to pay attention and get involved.

However, within the YouTube videos, interviews, and podcasts, we see that doTERRA and Young Living distributors’ ability to get potential recruits to look at their social media information goes beyond naming fears. These distributors leverage fear through cultivating the women viewers’ already existing sense of “mistrust” (Drążkiewicz, 2022; Marwick & Partin, 2022; McLaughlin, 2021) in the government and the medical community fostered by their own lived experiences and disenfranchisement. Throughout their presentations, we find that the essential oil influencers/distributors’ discussions emphasize heightened fear and mistrust that speak specifically to many subpopulations of conservative women and mothers, which serves as a segue into Pastel QAnon anti-vaccination disinformation.

One trend we saw emerged early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussions of the benefits of ingesting oils began to intersect with claims surrounding the prevention and cure of COVID-19. Previously, doTERRA and Young Living’s On Guard and Thieves oils’ marketing centered broadly on enhancing immune and respiratory function via the internal consumption of these particular oil blends. Increasingly, we saw that doTERRA and Young Living distributors began producing connections between wellness discussions, essential oils, and COVID-19 anti-vaccination conspiracy trends associated with QAnon. In particular, they shared those that accused government health institutions of hiding medical data on vaccines, especially the COVID-19 vaccines. For example, we find that a chiropractor Dr Eric Zielinski (commonly known as “Dr. Z”) discusses in his YouTube videos how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) keeps the information about the benefits of essential oils from the public. Zielinski says:

What the FDA has done has made it illegal, actually illegal, to make any sort of medical claims associated with essential oils if you’re selling essential oils. The system has been designed to keep away this message. But we have the freedom of speech to share what we do. (Unwell: Essential Oils, 2020)

The FDA and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did issue warnings to essential oil companies, amongst other wellness companies selling teas, tinctures, and colloidal silver, to halt the dissemination of claims related to the prevention, cure, or treatment of COVID-19. FTC chairman Joe Simons urged these wellness companies to refrain from preying on consumers’ vulnerability produced by widespread health fears and anxieties (United States Federal Trade Commission, 2020). Dr Z’s commentary reframes this warning intended to safeguard consumer safety as a message of mistrust, where the government medical establishments deliberately try to suppress knowledge about the evidence regarding the effectiveness of essential oils. Essential oil distributors and proponents often interpret scientific expertise and institutions ensuring consumer protections as contrary to the healing power and necessity of natural remedies, such as essential oils. Therefore, portraying essential oils as a medical intervention explicitly being kept from the public leverages viewers’ fears and mistrust to look to the MLM for the solution using Pastel QAnon conspirituality.

The Look also has a gendered component to the distributor’s affective appeals to fear and mistrust. For example, we see that women distributors also make Pastel QAnon COVID-19 anti-vaccination claims to get women recruits to look using soft tones and frilly memes to promote disinformation. On 21 December 2021, one doTERRA distributor @_mommys.magic_ shared an official White House message reading, “Get Vaccinated Now. It’s free. It’s convenient. It saves lives. It’s your patriotic duty.” with the word vaccinated crossed out and replaced with “healthy.” Supplanting vaccines with the word healthy creates an ideological contrast between health and vaccination and safety and danger, fueling anti-vaccination sentiments. As the post features continuous marketing of essential oils, @_mommys.magic_ constructs oils as a holistic remedy that supports health while arguing that vaccines do not. We also note that male distributors or company affiliates draw on the authoritative male voice in a position of power. They draw on titles such as “doctor,” speak about their academic credentials, and even use laboratory or stately office settings to convey their expertise. This affirms Pavelko and Barkers’ study (2022) on wellness MLM websites where promotional MLM website photos of men portray them as authority figures and as “scientific” men of reason, evidenced by their appearances in lab coats with clipboards. Ultimately, the gendered messaging places gender on a binary where men’s and women’s roles are fundamentally opposed, where men are born for leadership and women are born for nurturing the health and happiness of their children and home (Mikkelsen & Kronfield, 2021).

Similarly, Young Living distributor and YouTube influencer Nikki Phillipi draws on feminized recruitment strategies to appeal to viewers’ fears and institutional distrust, enticing them to look at her content. In one of her casual YouTube Q & A sessions, she softens QAnon propaganda by integrating anti-vaccination content, the government’s censorship of essential oil researchers, and distrust of scientific research between banal discussions about the challenges of being a new mom, maintaining intimacy in the marriage, and suggestions for pots and pans. She uses a “conversational tone” that often emphasizes her place as a wife and mother to instruct other women without taking on the commanding authority of male leadership roles (Mikkelsen & Kornfield, 2021).

Phillippi overlaps the categories of MLM distributor and QAnon influencer as she builds her brand through Young Living content, Pastel QAnon conspirituality, and viral videos about motherhood. With 1.24 million followers on YouTube and 414,000 followers on Instagram, the widespread dissemination of conspiracy thinking regarding vaccines and medical research creates new entry points for QAnon to recruit and radicalize socially conservative, religious women. In other words, they get them looking at the essential oils business and Pastel QAnon as a potentially viable solution to their fears and distrust. Other lesser known doTERRA and Young Living female distributors that we studied also use similar content in their videos. However, unlike Phillippi, they also reinforce these messages in their responses to followers’ comments by reiterating their original points combined with encouragement, like “you’ve got this!”

However, the Look is not enough to recruit new women into the business or indoctrinate them into QAnon. Distributors must convince women to invest in them, figuratively and financially, which we call the Hook. The following section explores the interwoven components for effectively deploying the Hook.

The Hook

This section examines the Hook or the gendered recruitment strategies of doTERRA and Young Living distributors. The goal is to transition viewers from looking at content to convincing them that the essential oils business and Pastel QAnon are the solutions to their fears and distrust and the forces of sexism, ableism, and classism that shape their lived experiences. Oils serve as the silver bullet to problems produced by structures of inequality. Distributors leverage women’s distress into purchasing power, recruitment, and indoctrination through disinformation.

Distributors often use intertwined discourses in their digital campaigns to effectively hook viewers into becoming recruits: A neoliberal post-feminist discourse that emphasizes women’s individual agency, personal “empowerment,” dedication, and hard work to obscure the structural inequalities underpinning women’s social, health, and financial precarity (Lamoreaux, 2013; Wrenn, 2014) and pseudo-religious messages that entreat women to embrace their “higher purpose,” remain positive, and trust in God’s plan to receive His bounty of blessings (Wrenn & Waller, 2021). The Hook’s attractiveness is that women living within rigid gender hierarchies in the home and their faith see essential oils as a solution to their social isolation, financial instability, and purposelessness without rocking the boat at home or acknowledging structural inequalities that shape their lived experiences. Moreover, the Hook can be adjusted to fit a variety of women’s life circumstances. For example, in an interview that we analyzed, Young Living distributor and devout Christian Laura Warford articulates the restrictions created by being a stay-at-home mom and how essential oils offer greater freedom, noting:

You can lose yourself outside of being Mommy. I can be creative now. I can use my gifts that I didn’t even know I had before this. I can have adult conversations with people. I went from making zero dollars a month to over zero dollars a month. (Monroe, 2017)

Similarly, we observed the ways in which essential oils distributors articulate how institutions, such as healthcare, fall short in supporting young people with disabilities. Our findings affirm other work on mothers of children with disabilities and their struggle to find adequate resources and interventions within an ableist and sexist healthcare system (Sousa, 2011). One of the doTERRA distributors that we examined in our study, Britt Yap, noted how her son is a crucial inspiration for turning to essential oils work:

You have to be really clear about why you want to do it (selling essential oils). Because otherwise you’ll make excuses. My “why” has always been my family and my son. My son is 5 years old and autistic and non-speaking. I always prayed for an opportunity to secure finances for him in the future. This (doTERRA) for me is his income, this is how I’m setting up my son. My daughter will need to take care of him when I’m no longer here, I don’t want her to have financial burdens (doTERRA International LLC, 2022).

We see how Britt Yap’s experiences highlight how capitalist contexts produce financial stress by not accounting for people with disabilities’ needs for care and support. That burden rests solely on individual families, particularly mothers, to plan for and provide health and wellness accommodations without adequate state support.

In another digital media podcast found in the company’s podcast library via its website, doTERRA distributor Amber Drake said in an interview with a company representative, “You wanted to help women find themselves again after having children. It’s a real thing, after you have children, you need to find yourself again. (With doTERRA) you’re finding new community, finding new talents and skills” (doTERRA International LLC, 2021). Noting that women have existential crises after the birth of their children is not original and is discussed widely among women from all backgrounds. However, what is innovative about the message is how distributors package the promise of purpose and personal empowerment to a specific audience, conservative women, without explicitly saying so. Women who are in traditional marriages raising children see the potential to gain community, skills, and talents right from home without the need to radically change one’s lifestyle. In other words, the “hook” assures these women that they find fulfillment in their existing situation by becoming a distributor.

Since a substantial number of doTERRA and Young Living MLM distributors are Mormon women (Lindsey, 2016) and conservative Christian women (Palveko & Barker, 2022), many are stay-at-home mothers who face isolation from communities beyond their domestic sphere. Mormon households often adhere to traditionally patriarchal ideologies with stark divisions of labor, so women often experience the burden of domestic work and its various dimensions of emotional taxation in isolation. Assuming sole responsibility for domestic labor consumes women’s time and energy while limiting opportunities for cultivating communities outside the nuclear family unit and church networks. Amber Drake and the representative’s messages attempt to resonate with listeners using pseudo-religious messaging appealing to mothers’ desires for identity, purpose, and community. We see that the podcast sends neoliberal post-feminist messaging that inspires and motivates those interested in becoming distributors and those looking for strategies to create more sales and business connections to find success. Under these religious, social, and familial constraints, women’s isolation and lack of identity and purpose stem from oppressive gender roles and expectations that limit women’s growth beyond caretaking. Still, rather than identifying how patriarchal oppression within the home prevents these women from having their social, emotional, and intellectual needs met, doTERRA identifies essential oils as a remedy for the dissatisfaction produced by gender inequalities through a combination of these two discourses.

At the heart of the Hook are distributors disseminating various types of disinformation on social media, especially those exaggerating the products’ effectiveness. The disinformation, quasi-religious, and neoliberal post-feminist messaging presented in a digital social setting creates a false sense of support within the social institutions that women find themselves most marginalized within (Wrenn, 2014) and gives them a feeling of “personal comfort and control” (Chai et al., 2021). Within the dataset, we noted that the distributors “hook” followers with disinformation about the power of essential oils around common themes about personal trauma, anxiety and depression, and children with disabilities. Unlike the podcasts and interviews that often focus on a conversation between two or more people discussing financial incentives, personal triumphs, and the so-called “smear campaigns” against essential oils, we see that YouTube videos personalized the distributors by showcasing their everyday family activities and highlighting the uses of essential oils to combat their personal daily challenges.

For instance, Adam’s Autism Family, a doTERRA distributor YouTube account with 113,000 subscribers, entitles their various videos with “Autism boy” followed by something Adam is doing. Often, the action has something to do with essential oils. Videos detail the difficulties and joys of providing care and support for children with autism while emphasizing that essential oils are a vital healthcare intervention for children with autism amidst a lack of support and healthcare options. For example, a 2018 video entitled “doTERRA oils protected my Autism son ADAM” details how oregano and peppermint oils calm Adam and even supported his recovery from a mysterious stomach flu (Adam’s Autism Family, 2018).

These social media videos encompass all of the elements of the Hook. They provide information and a sense of solidarity with other families who have children with autism and foster a higher sense of purpose for women who want to take charge of their children’s health and family’s financial welfare through essential oils. At the center is the selective disinformation about the products. Rather than directly making medical claims about the effectiveness of essential oils, these distributors share their personal experiences about how oils worked for their children. Many parents may find resonance in these anecdotal stories of stress stemming from the pressure to financially and emotionally support their children, which undoubtedly inspires a sense of comfort, hope, and control. Viewing videos like Adam’s Autism Family creates the allure of a silver-bullet solution for calming children with autism through essential oils, even though doTERRA disclaims “results not typical.” Nevertheless, sharing personal experiences is a powerful way to bring other parents of children with autism into the essential oils fold.

The disinformation around hooking can be augmented to reach recruits beyond mothers of children with disabilities. Like the messaging around neoliberal post-feminism and pseudo-religious platitudes, the product disinformation can target everyone from stay-at-home mothers and single moms to women in abusive relationships. Essential oils distributors, for instance, discuss using oils to cure and heal abuse and trauma on Twitter. doTERRA distributor @SaarGrolleman on Twitter said, “I bought an oil I’ve never purchased before in my time with doTERRA! This one is incredible for healing trauma. I’m unboxing it for you as I explain more about our Loyalty Rewards Program” (Grolleman, 2018).

In the previous section, we saw how distributors misconstrued disinformation regarding essential oils’ curing effects as a government conspiracy to hide information played on viewers’ fear and mistrust to get them to look at their content. Below we see distributors hook recruits by combining disinformation about essential oil’s curing effects with Pastel QAnon’s COVID-19 anti-vaccination propaganda to create the illusion of promise and comfort. Ultimately, doTERRA and Young Living distributors identified this as a hooking strategy to garner recruits, increase sales, and indoctrinate others into conspirituality.

Young Living distributors claim that Thieves oil creator, D. Gary Young, created the blend “from research recorded in the archives of the British Museum library about a group of 14th-century European perfumers and spice traders who rubbed oils on themselves while they robbed the dead and dying” (Young Living Essential Oils, 2022). Legend has it that the prisoners who evaded death from the Bubonic Plague consumed large quantities of vinegar macerated with garlic, sometimes infused with herbs such as wormwood, rosemary, and clove. By asserting the Young Living Thieves oil is directly correlated to the legends surrounding unsubstantiated remedies for the bubonic plague, D. Gary Young’s folklore offered inspiration for distributors looking to draw tenuous connections between cures for the Bubonic plague and COVID-19 interventions. For instance, on 15 July 2020, a Young Living distributor @cyndilenz tweeted about Thieves blend oil, saying, “if it’s good enough for the plague, it’s good enough for COVID.” Similarly, on 23 March 2020, Young Living distributor @djstarlight10 noted, “well this is an interesting time in history. Kind of reminds me of the plague that Young Living Thieves is named after. #plague #yuck #dirtyvirus” (Higgins, 2020).

The Bubonic plague rarely spreads from person-to-person contact, and the widespread transmission of COVID-19 is directly connected to institutional responses (or the lack thereof) to control the virus by minimizing person-to-person contact. However, women’s fear and distrust of the medical system and the government through their lived experiences (Drążkiewicz, 2022; Marwick & Partin, 2022; McLaughlin, 2021) created widespread anxiety where digitally networked circulation of disinformation and conspirituality could flourish (Chai et al., 2022; McLaughlin, 2021). Recruits feeling disenfranchised, distrustful, and afraid reject elites’ authoritative expertise’ in favor of the “homegrown” knowledge (Marwick & Partin, 2022) demonstrated by essential oil distributors, who also are Pastel QAnon adjacent. As women recruits become hooked on the promises of essential oils, they become primed for a fuller indoctrination into Pastel QAnon conspirituality. For this, we need to explore the process of the Disinformation Downline.

The Disinformation Downline

We saw how product disinformation hooks new recruits into the MLM business and potentially QAnon. Hooking is not enough to fully indoctrinate others into QAnon and have recruits pass it on to others. Chia et al. (2021) argue that the internet’s algorithmic searches and news feeds, along with massive amounts of information snippets and statistics online, can lead users into a confirmation bias loop of conspirituality that “feels” true but instead exchanges actual knowledge for “a personalized sense of control and comfort.” We add, however, that to initiate the loop, an agent must show others the way to the “correct” loop to effectively indoctrinate others and get them to share what they have learned. This is the essence of the Disinformation Downline, a gendered pipeline for radicalization that encourages the recruits to share what they “learned” with others.

The economic model of the pyramid organization is just as important to the radicalization and indoctrination of disinformation producers and consumers as the highly appealing and seductive nature of the messages’ content. Within MLMs, duplication or adding more downstream distributors to an individual’s network is essential to downlining (Wrenn & Waller, 2021). While the MLM business can be lucrative for big distributors, their social media influence also creates a different income stream. One of the easiest ways for distributors to obtain more followers who will click on other paying content or create content that pays upline is to implore recruits to “do the research.” Many doTERRA and Young Living distributors constantly call for additional research on essential oils, which feed into the Pastel QAnon anti-vaccination propaganda. For instance, Chad Drake, a psychologist and Diamond-level doTERRA distributor, said in an interview with the doTERRA Empowered Success podcast, “there’s already a lot of research on oils and we need more of it” (doTERRA International LLC, 2021).

However, distributors/QAnon influencers must teach recruits how to trick the algorithm into producing an anti-vaccination/pro-QAnon confirmation bias to successfully downline disinformation. Simply searching for anti-vaccination topics on different search engines can potentially provide unwanted results, such as debunking essential oils or QAnon. Thus, distributors use the “wormhole” technique to instruct followers into the feedback loop. Many distributors talk about or suggest going “down the rabbit hole” or “the wormhole,” which means clicking on the distributor’s recommended videos, hashtags, and links, then clicking on the videos that follow, and so on. The internet’s architecture quickly accommodates the new preferences and begins to regurgitate content based on the cultivation of clicks.

For example, in a 31 August 2020, YouTube video entitled “Vaccines, CBD & Intimacy After Baby! Q&A 2020,” Young Living distributor and YouTube influencer Nikki Phillipi argued that if you “think anti-vaxxers are crazy, you haven’t gone down the wormhole enough, and you haven’t done enough research.” In the same video, she pointed her 1.24 million YouTube followers to advice from Del Bigtree, saying he is “impeccable with his sources and is being censored because his opinions differ from large medical establishments.” Bigtree is a notable anti-vaccination activist who produced Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, a 2016 film alleging a cover-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conceal links between the MMR vaccine and autism. Bigtree spoke at the MAGA Freedom Rally, which took place a block from the 6 Jan Capitol insurrection, urging attendees to see how the election was stolen from Donald Trump and that COVID-19 vaccinations are dangerous (Devine & Griffin, 2021). Distributors like Philippi use hashtags, “research” recommendations, and search suggestions to keep followers clicking on the content. Thus, recruits unwittingly trick the algorithm into providing information based on repeated clicking of recommended content that confirms Pastel QAnon anti-vaccination disinformation.

The Disinformation Downline requires careful crafting of the influencer’s digital real estate. Their profiles cultivate an impression that women are among positive, trustworthy female friends (Heřmanová, 2022). Videos and posts include a variety of inspirational and spiritual sayings (Tiffany, 2020b) that suggest that women can be “digital warriors” for the cause if they get the correct information. More importantly, they often begin with half-truths that speak of real problems within the government and healthcare. However, they quickly lay out opportunities and guidance to start followers down the “wormhole.”

For instance, Jessica Alix Hesser, an Instagram influencer with 70k followers, offers content at the intersections of wellness, institutional critique, and disinformation. Hesser raises conversations about the government’s neglect of social subjects’ well-being with suggestions to “fight the system” through encouraging joy, play, nourishment, and intimacy. She says that “so-called experts” (medical professionals, scientific researchers, and government officials) want to keep us sick and obedient by discouraging genuine paths to wellness. She argues that they demand we conform to social norms such as receiving vaccinations, taking medications, devaluing women’s pleasure, and working jobs that deny us any time for leisure.

Although Hesser makes legitimate critiques of capitalist modes of production, like Phillipi, Hesser immediately directs followers who may have similar critiques of social structures down a path of “doing their own research” to downline followers into disinformation flows. Hesser guides followers toward the “off-grid bundle” in her featured Instagram stories which offer resources, tips, and links to like-minded authors and activists she supports. In her pinned Instagram stories, Hesser emphatically encourages followers to read “How to Opt Out of the Technocratic State” by author and activist Derrick Broze. By clicking on links to Derrick Broze’s content, we find podcasts and documentaries that confirm QAnon conspirituality theories, such as the Pyramid of Power (a conspiracy contending that various individuals are responsible for child trafficking and technological surveillance) and the harms of vaccination. Links include his Twitter account, where he shares memes and articles with his significant following about people dying immediately upon receiving Covid boosters and that health issues, such as cancer, are correlated to 5G networks (Broze, 2021).

More prominent distributors create other distributors, often with smaller social media accounts perpetuating the disinformation downline. While recruits might continue to do the research, they use “the research” and begin their recruitment downline and indoctrination by formulating their own unique content. These accounts may not have as wide of a reach as their followers, but they have the potential to do sufficient damage as there are more of them. Lesley Vos (2020) wrote an article for the Association of National Advertisers explaining that many social media users “don’t trust celebs or experts with more than 100,000 followers anymore.” Micro-influencers, on the contrary—and their even more niche cousins, nano-influencers, with fewer than 10,000 followers—can seem less sold-out and more authentic, approachable, or relatable (Fetters Maloy & De Vynck, 2021).

Scholars must remember that the disinformation downline is not a linear process. While big influencers such as Philippi have visibility and power, they have already been taken in by the disinformation downline and serve as a duplication for others’ upline elsewhere. Ultimately, the disinformation downline of the essential oil distributors contributes to a larger web of disinformation meant to indoctrinate others into the wellness community’s conspirituality myths.

Discussion and Conclusion

We have shown how doTERRA and Young Living essential oil distributors employ an iterative, three-pronged gendered disinformation strategy on social media to simultaneously recruit new women into the MLM business and indoctrinate them into conspirituality theories like Pastel QAnon. We call them The Look, The Hook, and the Disinformation Downline. The Look entails distributors using social media videos and posts to exploit potential new sellers’ fears of continued financial instability, health anxieties, and distrust in medical and government institutions to get them to look at their content for solutions. Distributors then hook potential recruits with promises that essential oils are the answer to the forces of sexism, ableism, and classism that produce the social conditions which create visceral feelings of anxiety, frustration, loneliness, and distrust. These strategies prime recruits for the Disinformation Downline as distributors instruct them on how to “research” these claims, which trick the algorithms into producing confirmation bias that feeds into disinformation about conspirituality theories such as Pastel QAnon. Sufficiently radicalized recruits, in turn, share what they “learned” with others, which contributes to a web of disinformation-for-hire.

Disinformation influencers perpetuate medical disinformation due to their audiences’ distrust over medical and government institutions. Structural inequalities and health injustices breed distrust, which provokes some to invest in conspiracy thinking. We argue that disinformation scholars can no longer take for granted the normative position that these potential recruits should trust health institutions and mainstream media in monitoring medical misinformation and COVID-19 reporting more broadly. Disinformation studies and policymakers need to pay close attention to both the economic model of the disinformation machinery and the social and cultural context that lends to disinformation’s production and consumption.

Campaigns looking to disrupt disinformation and debunk conspiracy theories can only be successful when they adequately understand subscribers’ experiences of structural inequalities and cultural contexts that generate fears, anxieties, and institutional distrust (Drążkiewicz, 2022) and address them within the factual information. Despite some of the fantastical claims of the wellness community and Pastel QAnon ideologies, they illuminate a fork in the road regarding institutional critique. Pastel QAnon influencers and MLM distributors critique how medical and health establishments reinforce racism, sexism, and ableism, and these structural inequalities continuously reproduce disparities in quality of care and health outcomes, even if only to profit off the solutions they are selling.

The medical field falls short in providing adequate care and support for people with disabilities, women, people of color, and low-income populations, to name a few, in ways that center their autonomy, agency, and thriving. The government and healthcare establishments render a person’s impairment or failure to access financial, social, and health resources as their own burden to find accommodations and support. Resistance to the historical reality of healthcare injustice in the United States has caused some in the medical profession to think of equity in the abstract. Abigail Echo-Hawk, MA, a member of the Pawnee Nation and chief research officer of the Seattle Indian Health Board (Smith, 2022), argues that medical institutions must prioritize concrete solutions to healthcare injustices and often fail to do so. This failure of medical institutions to provide practical and adequate care to diverse populations leads to seeking alternative care paths. Such alternative paths include Pastel QAnon, wellness conspirituality, and MLMs, which speak of the distrust of medical institutions and the government, provoke investments in conspiracy thinking, and reject scientific research and thinking.

Is it surprising that debunking campaigns that use a government official, the mass media, or a government-affiliated medical expert to deliver the “straight facts” with no further context are easily ignored? Debunking campaign creators need to rethink their approach and positively reconfigure the strategies of successful QAnon influencers and MLM distributors to interrupt disinformation flows and replace them with factual information. For example, hiring “homegrown” social media influencers to address the critiques of medical and government institutions fostering distrust and fear across different subpopulations and simultaneously providing factual medical information can be a better approach to debunking. Such influencers can similarly provide links, posts, and other recommendations to ensure that the algorithms provide information supported by scientific research. Although the nuanced approach to addressing the plethora of issues that nurse distrust and fear across various communities are time-consuming (Drążkiewicz, 2022), it can eventually create webs of information that replace those of conspirituality marketed by disinformation influencers-for-hire.

Future research can investigate how the three-pronged gendered recruitment strategies of MLM and QAnon influencers are racialized and classed. Moreover, scholars would contribute to the literature by examining other MLMs’ recruitment strategies besides essential oils that have members linked to QAnon. Finally, social experiments and case studies of social media debunking campaigns that use different approaches to convey their effectiveness would also serve as a theoretical contribution and a social good.