"We're Not in That Circle of Misinformation": Understanding Community-Based Trusted Messengers Through Cultural Code-Switching

DOI

Partnering with trusted messengers is crucial to address vaccine hesitancy in marginalized communities, given distrust in health authorities rooted in historical inequities. Social computing technologies are increasingly being used to counter misinformation, but more work is needed to understand how they can support the work of community-based trusted messengers. We describe an early exploration of these opportunities in our collaboration with Black and Latinx young adult “Peer Champions” addressing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in a southern U.S. state. We conducted interviews engaging them with a social media monitoring and outreach dashboard we designed, using it to probe their understanding of their roles and current and potential use of digital platforms. With the concept of cultural code-switching as a framing, we found that the Peer Champions leveraged their particular combination of cultural, health, and digital literacy skills to understand their communities’ concerns surrounding misinformation and to communicate health information in a culturally appropriate manner. While their positioning between their communities and public health research and practice motivated and enabled their work, it also introduced challenges in finding (mis)information online and navigating tensions around authenticity and respect in engaging those close to them. Our research contributes towards characterizing the valuable and difficult work trusted messengers do, and (re)imagining collaboratively designed interpretive digital tools to support them.