GRID: Modeling Health Influencer Discourse as Argument Networks for Credibility Assessment

Abstract

Health-related discussions on social media are increasingly shaped by influencers who offer diverse, and often competing perspectives on the same issue. Yet, such content is typically evaluated in isolation, without considering the broader discourse in which it appears. We introduce GRID (Grounded Reasoning over Interconnected Discourse), a framework for evaluating influencer content through collective inference over the surrounding discourse. GRID represents each video as an argumentation graph connecting claims to its central message, or takeaway, links related claims and takeaways across videos, grounds claims in scientific evidence, and jointly infers credibility over the resulting network. We evaluate GRID on an end-to-end health-related content validation task using 569 influencer videos grounded in expert assessments. Our results show that accounting for the broader discourse improves influencer content validation. Finally, we use GRID-inferred credibility to demonstrate how argumentative strategies and moral framing differ between low- and high-credibility content.