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India’s regulatory mechanisms fail to regulate health and wellness misinformation in an era where para-experts and social media algorithms shape public health beliefs
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The digital wellness content industry in India today functions as an unregulated epistemic system, where health-related claims are produced by uncredentialed actors, amplified by opaque algorithms, and consumed at scale without any form of institutional verification. This industry encompasses a broad range of actors, including social media influencers, lifestyle bloggers, independent nutrition coaches, and wellness brands, operating across platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp. Their claims, ranging from nutritional “hacks” to pseudo-clinical advice, are not marginal aberrations but central to how health is understood, marketed, and enacted in online spaces.
Existing regulatory regimes such as the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), the Consumer Protection Act, and the Information Technology Rules were not designed to address this architecture. They assume clear distinctions between product and speech, advertiser and creator, publisher and platform. None are equipped to govern what now circulates as health authority in its own: algorithmically optimised content authored by para-experts and consumed as care.
By refusing to recognise influencers and platforms as epistemic actors, i.e., producers and distributors of health knowledge, India’s legal framework has systematically misrecognised the nature of the harm.
The issue is not only one of enforcement gaps but of categorical legal error. By refusing to recognise influencers and platforms as epistemic actors, i.e., producers and distributors of health knowledge, India’s legal framework has systematically misrecognised the nature of the harm. The result is a regime in which health misinformation proliferates not despite regulation, but because the law continues to treat truth as a product of intention rather than infrastructure.
India’s regulatory engagement with digital health content is shaped by legacy frameworks that no longer align with the informational realities of the platform economy. Across statutes and regulatory guidelines, the legal apparatus presumes that health-related influence is either a function of product advertising or individual misrepresentation, governed by intentionality, transaction, and harm. This premise collapses entirely in the face of algorithmically distributed health discourse, authored by para-experts, monetised indirectly, and consumed not as advertising, but as epistemic authority.
The FSSAI operates under the 2006 Food Safety and Standards Act, with a mandate oriented around product integrity: labelling, packaging, nutrient content, and direct health claims attached to consumables. Its jurisdiction does not extend to the discursive infrastructure of nutrition, such as standalone health advice on fasting, hormonal diets, or detox protocols. Unless there is a tangible product to inspect or recall, the FSSAI remains inactive. This reflects a materialist regulatory bias that links public health only to what is ingested, not to how knowledge about ingestion is constructed and circulated.
Across statutes and regulatory guidelines, the legal apparatus presumes that health-related influence is either a function of product advertising or individual misrepresentation, governed by intentionality, transaction, and harm.
The ASCI, while engaging with digital platforms, remains a voluntary, non-statutory entity. It applies standards only when speech is legibly “advertising,” thereby excluding most influencer content that is aesthetic, aspirational, or affectively framed. Even when monetisation occurs via affiliate links or brand alignment, regulatory intervention is contingent on explicit promotional framing, which much of wellness content avoids through careful ambiguity. ASCI's self-regulatory model ensures that even when violations are identified, enforcement is soft, slow, and often publicly invisible.
Recognising the growing impact of influencers, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs issued the 2023 Guidelines for Health and Wellness Influencers, requiring disclosure of qualifications and mandatory disclaimers for unverified advice. While notable in acknowledging influencers as health communicators, the guidelines remain non-binding, reliant on platforms for enforcement, and focused on professional credentials rather than epistemic authority or content virality. Crucially, they still operate within a transactional paradigm regulating misleading commercial endorsements, not ambient influence that reframes how the public thinks about health.
The Consumer Protection Act, 2019, is similarly limited by its enforcement logic. It relies on individualised harm, initiated through consumer complaints. However, much of the harm caused by wellness misinformation is cumulative, systemic, and difficult to temporally isolate. An Instagram reel claiming “alkaline water prevents cancer” may not cause direct injury, but it can delay treatment, instil distrust in clinical care, and circulate for years without a singular moment of damage that satisfies the legal threshold for redress.
While notable in acknowledging influencers as health communicators, the guidelines remain non-binding, reliant on platforms for enforcement, and focused on professional credentials rather than epistemic authority or content virality.
Finally, the IT Intermediary Guidelines, 2021, direct platforms to act against content deemed illegal, through hate speech, obscenity, defamation, or threats to sovereignty. Misinformation, particularly in health, is governed only post-facto, that too when it intersects with these categories. There is no affirmative obligation on platforms to prevent algorithmic amplification of false health claims, nor is there any legal recognition of systemic epistemic harm arising from platform architecture itself.
Collectively, these regimes reveal not a lack of law but a misalignment of legal categories with existing informational conditions. Regulation remains focused on product, transaction, or intent. However, wellness misinformation is not a discrete act of deception, it is a networked, para-clinical discourse, sustained by visibility, affect, and repetition. By continuing to treat digital health influence as a problem of misleading advertising or consumer fraud, Indian law fundamentally fails to apprehend its own object.
The regulatory difficulty in addressing nutrition-related misinformation online is not simply a matter of misrecognition but of institutional displacement. Bodies traditionally charged with governing health claims, including the FSSAI, the Ministry of AYUSH, and the Ministry of Health, no longer control the primary infrastructures through which health narratives circulate. That role now lies with platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which shape visibility, engagement, and authority through algorithmic design. Nevertheless, under Indian law, they are classified as intermediaries, not curators.
This produces a structural contradiction: the entities most capable of modulating exposure to health-related content bear no primary responsibility for its accuracy or impact. Under the IT Rules (2021), platforms are only obligated to act against content that violates specific statutory prohibitions (e.g., obscenity, hate speech). There is no category for medically misleading or epistemically unreliable health content, unless it involves direct commercial deception or incitement to harm.
Bodies traditionally charged with governing health claims, including the FSSAI, the Ministry of AYUSH, and the Ministry of Health, no longer control the primary infrastructures through which health narratives circulate.
The content producers themselves - lifestyle influencers, unaccredited “nutrition coaches,” and self-described wellness experts - occupy an adjacent regulatory void. They are neither licensed professionals nor traditional advertisers. Their speech does not trigger medical accountability, nor does it qualify as advertising unless clearly transactional. Even recent guidelines for wellness influencers are advisory and compliance-based, with no statutory authority or enforcement framework in place.
In effect, the governance of public health representation has migrated out of formal state institutions without any corresponding legal shift. The state continues to regulate pharmaceuticals, clinics, and packaged food but exerts no meaningful authority over the discursive systems now shaping health beliefs at the population scale.
The structural misfit between India’s legal regimes and contemporary digital health discourse produces a series of legal-process failures that extend beyond public health. First, it creates a condition in which harm cannot be formally recognised. Because neither platforms nor influencers are categorised as institutions or actors capable of producing public risk in the health domain, no liability framework can be triggered through administrative sanction, professional discipline, or consumer protection mechanisms. The law lacks not only the enforcement tools but the doctrinal categories necessary to even name the harm.
The FSSAI, the ASCI, and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs operate within non-overlapping scopes, with no central authority empowered to evaluate the circulation of health-related claims at the content level.
Second, the misalignment prevents institutional coordination. The FSSAI, the ASCI, and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs operate within non-overlapping scopes, with no central authority empowered to evaluate the circulation of health-related claims at the content level. This makes cross-regulatory intervention structurally unviable, particularly for misinformation that is high-visibility but low-risk in traditional enforcement terms (e.g., diet fads, supplement culture, unverified home remedies).
Third, it erodes the legitimacy of public health communication. When influencers and platforms dominate narrative reach, state-issued advisories and medically verified information lose comparative visibility, not necessarily due to public distrust, but due to algorithmic marginality. The result is a weakening of the state’s informational authority, not through challenge, but through quiet procedural irrelevance.
These are not correctable through piecemeal reform. Without a foundational reassessment of how Indian law conceptualises digital health actors and infrastructures, the state’s capacity to regulate will remain procedurally intact but substantially inert - present in statute but absent in effect.
Sumyya is a Research Intern at the Observer Research Foundation
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
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