If you spend any time online, you’ve probably noticed that the internet has a bit of a misinformation problem. Scroll long enough and you’ll encounter an influencer with a ring light, discount code, and unwavering confidence explaining how coffee enemas cure cancer, broccoli ruins your hormones, and modern healthcare is a conspiracy. It’s chaotic, occasionally absurd, and when it comes to health advice, sometimes deadly.
China has decided it’s had enough.
In late October, the country passed a sweeping law requiring influencers to prove they’re qualified before speaking on “serious” topics like health, education, finance, medicine, or law. If you want to tell people what supplements to buy or how cancer patients should treat their disease, you now need a degree, a license, or accredited training. Platforms like Douyin, Weibo, and Bilibili are required to verify these credentials. The Cyberspace Administration also banned advertising for medical products, supplements, and health foods disguised as “educational content”.
On paper, it sounds like a step in the right direction. After all, the harms of unqualified online health gurus aren’t theoretical, they’re documented. Just ask the survivors left behind by wellness influencer Belle Gibson’s fake cancer narrative. Or consider families misled by creators promoting “freebirth” (solo childbirth without medical supervision) despite evidence that timely intervention in the case of emergency can save lives.
It’s not hard to imagine how this regulation would land in North America. Somewhere, a U.S. senator is undoubtedly already polishing off a speech about the First Amendment. In Canada, Section 2(b) protections would ignite similar outrage. And the backlash wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable. Because while the law targets clear harms, it also opens the door to a much thornier question: Who gets to decide who is qualified enough to speak?
There’s a real risk that once governments begin defining whose knowledge counts, they also begin defining whose doesn’t. The internet—messy, contradictory, brilliant, and terrible—has democratized expertise. People who were once excluded from traditional institutions now have an audience. Survivors educating other survivors. Disabled creators teaching accessibility better than medical schools ever did. Marginalized communities documenting lived experience that academia never bothered to study.
Rules like China’s may silence not only charlatans, but also voices historically shut out of institutional power.
And, let’s not pretend credentials guarantee accuracy. People with MDs and PhDs have promoted expensive pseudoscientific treatments, pushed supplements, or blurred ethical lines with suspicious affiliate links. The law’s focus on qualification over intention leaves a loophole big enough for a wellness empire to march through.
There’s another unintended consequence: trust. At a moment when public faith in science and government wobbles precariously, heavy-handed enforcement risks pushing people further toward fringe communities where distrust thrives, and conspiracy monetizes.
So where does this leave us?
Somewhere uncomfortable.
Because the truth is: misinformation does kill. And the influencer economy has blurred the lines between expertise, storytelling, and salesmanship beyond recognition. There are already rules about practicing medicine without a license, but the influencer–follower relationship is uniquely murky; part entertainment, part mentorship, part parasocial therapy session.
China’s law is attempting to solve a real problem, but in doing so, it forces us to confront a harder question: if we don’t want regulation, then what’s our alternative? Blind faith in platform self-policing is… optimistic at best. Hoping audiences suddenly become media-literate skeptics is equally naïve.
Until we figure it out, the burden falls reluctantly on us: the scrollers.
When consuming online advice, ask the simplest but most revealing question: Does this person profit if I believe them? If the answer is yes, take a breath and a step back.
Degrees aren’t everything, but neither is charisma confidently dispensing health advice between sponsorships.
Somewhere between authoritarian regulation and chaotic misinformation is a solution. We just haven’t built it yet.
