Demi Lovato is shilling for an app that happens to be a hub for QAnon followers

Last week, Demi Lovato announced a vague new partnership with a “conscious video streaming” platform called Gaia. In an Instagram post, they held up a phone with the company’s name emblazoned across it in green, and wrote that they are “thrilled to be a @wearegaia ambassador. Understanding the world around us (the known and the unknown) is so exciting to me!”

At first glance, Gaia seems to peddle in slightly bizarre conspiracy theories about aliens, an area that Lovato has recently become vocal about as the host of Unidentified with Demi Lovato, a show on Peacock that explores the possibility of extraterrestrial life. But when you look past the “consciousness-expanding videos” and yoga and meditation classes that it innocuously labels its content as (the site was initially popular as a hub for yoga particularly early on in the pandemic), the streaming platform reveals itself to be a home to paranoid and misleading documentary content about chemtrails, vaccines, and secret shadow governments of lizard people.

Lovato’s partnership reportedly includes a curated selection of shows — including one about how Atlantis was real, and another about an ancient war between giants and lizards that predated humanity — to entice viewers into paying a subscription to the member-supported streaming site. Worse yet, the site, which hosts content about secret cabals that run the world, has become a major home to QAnon followers, many of whom moved to Gaia after being ousted from other sites and platforms. After being banned from Youtube and Facebook for repeatedly spreading misinformation about Covid, well-known British conspiracy theorist David Icke moved to Gaia, where he debuted his own show, Escape the Matrix.

It is entirely plausible that Lovato’s interest or even understanding of Gaia is mainly through the lens of its alien-related content — a press release announcing the ambassadorship described their initial connection to Gaia through an interest in one show host’s abilities to use meditation to communicate with aliens. But even a basic level of research from Lovato and their team before embarking on this partnership would yield a host of red flags. Lovato is apparently the site’s first celebrity ambassador, and their whopping 118 million follower count on Instagram is sure to drive a significant amount of new members to its purported 750,000-strong community of paid members.

"Understanding the world around us, both known and unknown, and diving deeper into areas that expand our consciousness is exciting to me and I am honored to be able to be a part of a community of people who want to do the same,” Lovato says in the press release. For the millions of fans who may just be going in initially for trippy alien videos, the line between “consciousness-expanding” wellness content and seriously dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories can quickly become blurred.