Conveying COVID-19 Health Information with CALD Social Media Influencers: The Cultural Role of Brand Consistency and Relatability for Identity Authenticity

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, young people and culturally and linguistically diverse populations (CALD) were underserved by non-tailored government health messaging. Social media influencers offer a potentially cost-effective and scalable form of health communication for reaching young CALD populations. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of an influencer’s identity authenticity for reaching CALD youth, or how that authenticity is underpinned by brand consistency and relatability. Drawing on the authors’ commissioned evaluation of a state government initiative for delivering targeted COVID-19 health information to CALD young people (11-26 years) in Victoria, Australia, this paper analyses findings from thirteen qualitative interviews with influencers and target audience members to provide insights on identity authenticity in the contemporary digital ecology. The analysis aims to contribute to the limited extant knowledge of the role third-party influencers can play in government health communication by providing a cultural context for understanding identity authenticity when targeting minority social groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• health communication
• culturally and linguistically diverse
• migrant
• COVID-19
• social media influencer

Introduction

With over half of all Australians (51.5 per cent) born overseas or with a parent born overseas and over 400 languages used at home (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022a, 2022b), Australia’s cultural and linguistic diversity is palpable. Despite such diversity, government health communication in Australia during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was broadly undifferentiated, and targeted interventions tended towards singular social categories of difference, such as race, gender or age without an appreciation of the significance of intersectionality (Camit 2021: Grey and Severin 2022). A lack of timely, translated, culturally appropriate and accessible health messaging for culturally and linguistically diverse populations created particular challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic (Seale 2021: Mamalipurath and Notley 2022). The term culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) is used in this paper to denote people born in non-English speaking countries, the children of people born in non-English speaking countries, and/or who do not speak English at home (adapted from Pham 2021).¹ CALD populations were at greater risk during the pandemic and with young people in these communities playing a key role as brokers of health messaging, targeted communication to CALD youth represents an important gateway to CALD communities.

Social media was an important source of information about COVID-19 for some migrant and ethnic minority populations (Goldsmith 2022) and young people are known to source news and information from digital platforms (Notley 2020), including health information (Vereen et al. 2021). Similarly, social media influencers are increasingly recognised as having the reach and social engagement in shaping conversations among online communities (Abidin 2015: Byrne et al. 2017). Government and official collaboration with third-party influencers to better target health communication and intervene in important public discourse presents an important opportunity for health promotion, particularly for providing young and CALD populations with appropriately targeted information (Lutkenhaus et al. 2019). Specifically, a stronger analysis of the conditions of identity authenticity for aligning CALD young influencers with government messages in the context of public health communication traditionally limited by the whiteness of Australian English-language public media and institutions, is a necessary step to ensure CALD youth can better access and participate in health discourse (Camit 2021: Vereen et al. 2021).

This builds upon insights from a commissioned evaluation of a Victorian State Government health communication campaign that engaged third-party CALD influencers on Facebook and Instagram to provide targeted COVID-19 information to young (11-26 years) CALD populations. We begin with background on three key aspects of this research: first, a summary of the unique challenges facing young CALD populations during the pandemic as analysed from a perspective attentive to the need for intersectional and inclusive media in the digital ecology, followed by a discussion of recent theorisation of identity authenticity in contemporary digital culture, and ending with a description of the CALD Youth Content Campaign and the nascent scholarship on the role of third-party influencers in official communication. After a discussion of the research methods and key findings, we present our analysis of the role of cultural identity authenticity in terms of benefits to communication coherence and the cultivation of trust among audiences attentive to three main aspects: (1) the need for influencer autonomy in collaborations to ensure and maintain brand consistency and audience trust; (2) the labour associated with maintaining identity authenticity in third-party health communication collaborations that are underpinned by normative assumptions; and (3) the expressed need for relatability that is not exclusively about ethnic or racial identity but incorporates intersectional practices related to the brand. We argue that these insights present important opportunities for the governance of targeted health communication utilising third-party influencers as an emergent practice in the digital ecology.

Background

CALD Populations and COVID-19 Health Communication

During the COVID-19 pandemic, CALD populations were at greater risk of contracting COVID-19 in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022c), with a higher recorded COVID-19 mortality rate (up to 31 March 2022) among people living in Australia who were born overseas (ABS 2022b). People born in North Africa and the Middle East had the highest death rate at 36.5 per 100,000 in contrast to 4.8 for people born in Australia (ABS 2022b). Existing forms of structural disadvantage were recognised as contributing to this greater risk, including particularly high employment in frontline workplaces (Hamilton et al. 2021). However, there has also been some recognition that a factor in these higher rates has been the persistent challenges of disseminating health information to Australia's diverse multicultural population (Macnamara and Camit 2017), and the need to tailor health messaging specifically for CALD populations (Wild 2020).

The Burden of Core Institutional ‘Whiteness’ and the Issue of Inclusivity for CALD Populations

There are several obstacles to ensuring the inclusion of CALD populations in official health communication, ranging from rudimentary access to, more significantly, the underlying ‘core targeting’ and ‘core representation’ of Australian governmental and media institutions (Lutkenhaus et al. 2019). At the level of accessibility, the increasing scale and growth of linguistic diversity in Australia has meant that many people cannot read and interpret information presented in English (Grey and Severin 2022), with lower levels of literacy and health literacy among some populations (Seale 2021), and a lack of trust in government messaging (Couch et al. 2021) has been exacerbated by poor allocation of resources for health communication to these groups (Camit 2021: Grey and Severin 2022). Evidence shows that in Australia during the pandemic, there was a lack of timely translated material and inappropriate health messaging for CALD populations (Wild 2020: Seale 2021: Parker 2023).

At a second level, the exposure of CALD youth to high rates of racism during the early months of the pandemic was found to intensify distrust of institutional media and communication and reduce interest in engaging with official messaging (Centre for Multicultural Youth 2020: Australian Asian Alliance 2021: Couch et al. 2021). The unpaid labour among CALD youth for performing language and digital communication brokering responsibilities within their families and communities (Worrell 2021), simultaneously presents an additional labour burden but also a potential gateway for health communication engagement among CALD communities. The agency and willingness of young people in CALD communities to distribute health information during the pandemic led Couch et al. (2021) to state that ‘A daring governmental policy would acknowledge, recognise, connect, and facilitate the power of young people’ (p. 255).

However, at a third level, the core targeting of government and media health messaging actively marginalises groups perceived as ‘non-core’ in Australia. In the early months of the pandemic, Australian public discourse on multiculturalism and population retreated into familiar dichotomies of ‘core’ multicultural Australia, represented by whiteness, as diametrically opposed to multicultural ‘otherness’, perceived in some cases as bringing infection, in others as not warranting the same level of safety attention, information and communication as a middle-class white Australia (Cover 2023a). Such polarisation of whiteness and otherness is familiar in previous instances of crisis (West 1995: Ahmed 2004: Poynting 2004: Turner 2006). Here, non-whiteness becomes a frame not merely for the cohesion of a ‘white’ core in need of protection in the context of multiculturalism in retreat during crisis, but a subjectivity frame relegated to the outside of the protective force of health communication. While not forgotten (language, address, inclusion), to use Butler’s (2009) terminology, non-whiteness is made subject to an ‘interpretative frame’ where some lives are grievable and some lives are ungrievable. The formation of health communication is, then, underpinned by a set of discursive frames in the choice of targeting communication adequately and inclusively. As a cultural formation in connection with identity and recognition, such framing is not limited to governments (such as official communication and COVID-safety advertising), health institutions (such as advisers, medical practitioners and high-profile epidemiologists) but to other media as well, witnessed particularly in the selection of storytelling that depicted COVID-19 as ‘effecting everyone’ and thereby both represented Australia through its normative whiteness and regularly depicted a crisis as if it were experienced equally by all social groups in the country. In this context, a campaign devoted to using trusted third-party messengers in the form of influencers who have records of engagement among their communities is a valuable addition to media and government health communication to increase the targeting of messages to CALD and other minority communities. While this is not to suggest that it is a solution to the structural issues described above, it is arguably a sensible stop-gap measure in the context of a health crisis.

The CALD Youth Content Campaign as Health Communication Innovation

An example of the kind of third-party influencer campaigns recommended by the findings above is a campaign designed in 2020 by an interdepartmental taskforce of the State Government of Victoria, of which the authors of this paper were commissioned to evaluate and report on its effectiveness. The impetus for the government initiative emerged from a recognised need to build skills, capacities and resources for digital engagement across CALD communities by using trusted messengers rather than more familiar yet exclusive government and media channels, to respond to a perceived lack of compliance and knowledge about COVID-19 safety behaviours. The campaign aimed to facilitate active engagement between young people from CALD communities and organisations in the state and encourage compliance with health initiatives to reduce infections among communities understood to be at higher risk.

Drawing on third-party influencers to share messages with hardly-reached CALD communities in the context of a crisis is a mechanism to tap into the attention economy, which is a way of understanding the contemporary digital ecology as one not of free-exchange of messages but as having been re-oriented by platforms to compete for the scarce resource of public attention through a range of tactics, including engagement, sensationalism and para-social relationality (Bennett and Livingston 2018: Terranova 2022). Although this aspect of the affective economy is recognised as resulting in social fatigue and exhaustion, including during periods of global health crises (Braidotti 2020), it is not in itself without utility for producing engagement and advocacy with those who are traditionally marginalised in representation and audience orientation among traditional broadcast media (Goldberg 2018). In this context, the deployment of influencers as a key element in the affective capitalism of the contemporary digital ecology enabled a campaign that moves beyond traditional health communication in the context of crises whereby urgent messages may be highly controlled but limited by a lack of knowledge of their audiences (Lupton 2015). Using influencers who have longer experience of engagement with target communities is one way in which to build messages into the content that emerges from specific community members, and to have those messages refined by those who have authentic experience of those communities. Defined as a ‘new type of independent third-party endorsers who shape audience attitudes through blogs, tweets, and other social media applications’ (Freberg 2011, p. 90), influencers narrate their lives and share their expertise online (Abidin 2018). A vital characteristic of influencers is that they have amassed many followers on social media (Haenlein 2020). The size of their following is considered closely linked to their ability to monetise their accounts and treat their content creation as a professional career (Abidin 2018). Arguably, influencers now compete with professional content developers such as marketing and advertising agencies (Schouten et al. 2020) due to their added credibility and the perception of authenticity among niche audiences (Byrne et al. 2017: Molenaar 2020: Vereen et al. 2021).

The campaign involved a collaboration between an intermediary organisation with expertise in talent music production and distribution, and six CALD ‘trusted messengers’ or third-party ‘influencers’ with local or national followings on digital platforms and substantial CALD audiences. An intermediary talent management organisation was commissioned by the State Government to recruit third-party influencers and to co-design social media content to communicate quickly through channels not generally accessible to the government. Although not unique in Australia, the campaign was novel in its participatory and inclusive approach that allowed for digital engagement that extends beyond a one-to-one, linear delivery model. This differs from most contemporary health communication, which is typically one-way (Ratnam 2020). Scholars have advocated this two-way communication exchange using social media to encourage active engagement across institutions and facilitate empowerment (Ratnam 2020).

Under the guidance of the management agency staff, the influencers created videos that incorporated COVID-19 safety into their everyday lives as a means of encouraging their followers to do the same. For example, one influencer demonstrated how to practise social distancing while playing basketball outside, encouraging people to touch elbows instead of shaking hands or ‘high fiving’. Another filmed themselves maintaining a 1.5 m distance while buying coffee from a local café, while others provided footage of themselves wiping down playground swings and sanitising music equipment. The videos were all shot in settings that would be familiar to their followers. However, although the management agency had substantial control over the wording used in audio-visual content and any text accompanying the posts, there was a tendency to downplay the source of the messaging and to obscure the government sponsorship of the campaign. This resulted in the posts appearing to be well-meaning statements of advice solely constructed by the influencers, with only the occasional tag or hashtag linking the posts back to official institutional channels. Although a larger topic for separate analysis, this arrangement opens questions about the cultural normativisation and practice that aligns ‘official messaging’ and ‘news’ with ‘white middle-class Australia’ and ‘obscured messaging’ and ‘hidden sources’ with communication that targets CALD communities – a framework that had an impact on the identity authenticity practices of the influencers involved as we discuss below.

The Evaluation

The analysis we are presenting in this paper is a study of some of the findings from the evaluation of the campaign from the added perspective of the role of identity authenticity in the context of the contemporary media and digital ecology, the whiteness of representation and message-targeting of mainstream institutionalised media and government official channels, and the uneven burden of identity management during a period of global health crisis. In conducting the evaluation, the full corpus of campaign content and related materials were analysed, and qualitative data was collected via semi-structured interviews with 13 participants across two cohorts (three participants who were influencers in the campaign and ten members of the target audience groups recruited). The influencers interviewed are all talented musicians: Jabulani and Mary, young women, and Eufrasia, a young man.² Including a small number of influencers in our sample allowed for rich, in-depth narratives of their practices and experiences, garnering insights into what aspects of the collaboration from the influencers’ perspectives worked and did not work.

The target audience participants were recruited via influencers who shared a link to a short survey on their social media, inviting their followers to participate in the study. Ten were selected to participate in interviews to include as diverse a sample as possible: eight identified as women, and all were aged between 18 and 30 years. Participants had lived in Australia for four to 24 years and self-identified with various ethnic and racial backgrounds, including Asian, Australian, Black African, Chinese (two participants), Chinese-Singaporean, Interracial, Malay Australian, Malaysian Indian, and Sri Lankan moor. All participants provided informed consent and are referred to in this paper by pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.³

Interviews with influencers included questions about their experiences developing the content, challenges, and ways to improve this process. Questions also focused on their views of working within the multi-agency environment and providing health communication content. The target audience participants were asked about their opinions of the content, their perception of its likely impact, what they thought of the content form, type and style, and where these could be improved. The thematic analysis involved a period of immersion followed by inductive coding, and then category formation (Green 2007). Themes were then identified iteratively via, (1) discussion among the research team, (2) incorporation of key literature on targeted messaging, influencers, and health communication targeting CALD groups, and (3) triangulating the data to discern patterns across the two cohorts. Key themes were identified as core considerations for government agencies collaborating with third-party influencers to better target, and a series of recommendations were made by the authors to the commissioning parties related to governance, tone, branding consistency and mechanisms to protect third-party influencers from abuse and inadvertent brand damage. In the sections that follow, we analyse some of the findings from the perspective of identity authenticity for those participating in third-party health messaging attentive to the burden on authenticity and identity management in the context of the utilisation of the attention economy as a mechanism to overcome the exclusiveness in representation and message targeting of official and media institutions during health and other crises.

Identity Authenticity and Trust

What is sometimes referred to as a ‘cult of authenticity’ (e.g. Cover 2019) governs many aspects of the contemporary production of the performative self. This is a subject or identity that is culturally compelled to respond to the social demand for coherence, intelligibility, and recognisability to participate in and belong to the wider society. Authenticity is a very important aspect of this requirement for coherence, for without authenticity, the subject is open to the accusation of falsehood or being a ‘phony’, and therefore, of being perceived as schizophrenic, abject, inhuman or untrustworthy. It is, of course, the case that the language that constructs the categories of identities and authentic identity (such as sex, gender, bodies, and sexuality), in addition to the language used to describe and represent oneself through online storytelling, are by no means stable, but change, develop and react to the ‘making available’ of alternative languages and discourses – all of which allow certain kinds of fluidity and change in identity. In that context, there is no actual, genuine authenticity of identity. Rather, we are all from the beginning doomed to perform our identities against the possibility that coherence and intelligibility will fail – so we act to shore up our identities by performing in ways that appear authentic to ourselves and others; a sort of ‘true to oneself’ motif and an embrace of everyday experience as somehow more real than representation.

The setting for CALD third-party influencers that this cultural formation establishes, we argue, is one in which the onus is placed on them to argue for their own identity authenticity through self-management of their brand, coherence and consistency. Self-management of authenticity is not, of course, endemic to minorities – indeed, in a neoliberal and biopolitical governmentality framework, all subjects are called upon to be ‘managed’ through self-management, producing the self in line with given normative ranges and in accord with culturally-produced categories of recognition (Foucault 2008, p. 226). However, what the experience of some of our participants demonstrates, in the context of a global health crisis that plays out through the securitisation of the nation-state (Foucault 2007), is the burden of responding to the demand for authenticity.

One substantial causal framework of that burden is institutionalised media that centralises white, middle-class normativity as both authentic and warranting the securitised state and management of the population. In this context, we argue it is important that government strategies seeking to produce greater inclusivity in securitisation through targeted messaging using trusted, third-party influencers, need to be grounded first in responding to the additional burden of producing and sustaining authenticity among third-party communicators in line with the analysis of our participant data we provide below.

Target audience participants (audience or audience participants) described the positive relationship between perceptions of an influencer’s authenticity and trust in their message which some recognised as integral for facilitating health behaviour change, for example:

I always say that change happens at the speed of trust. So with COVID, you know that brought about massive behavioural change […] And you can only change that behaviour at the speed of how much you trust the information that it’s telling you […] so having someone like that who you trust, I think is really, really important and who can influence your different behaviours because you think […] ‘if they’re doing it then who am I not to do it as well?’ (James)

‘Real’ authenticity is always something that escapes us since the self is only knowable through the discourses and languages available to make sense of identity (Foucault 1980, p. 118). Indeed, there is a danger in attempting to invoke an idea of authenticity in which some identity practices are seen to be more authentic than others. For example, suggesting that certain kinds of influencer content are superior to (rather than just different from) content in more professionalised media settings is unhelpful. The distinction poses dangers when it is used as a mechanism for disavowing the lived experience of, say, Instagram influencers, just because the material is presented in a more professionalised, curated or filtered way than influencers who operate across TikTok. Indeed, any content may be just as meaningful, felt and perceived as trustworthy from an audience perspective. What is far more useful, then, is understanding influencer content not as being more authentic than professional communication, but as adopting a particular mode or genre of communication – an aesthetics of authenticity that generates a sense of trust because it engages an audience. In the case of influencers, this is often through incorporating messages (such as sponsored advertising) into descriptions of individual lived experiences to place trust in those messages rather than in the hyperreality, simulation and professionalisation that marks so much contemporary content production in the attention economy.

Several audience members, indeed, described the features that associate their appreciation of aesthetics of authenticity with trust in an influencer’s message, including where the message remains consistent with the community, and local and global social concerns with which they perceive the influencer to be associated. For example, Kelly appreciated that the influencers involved in the campaign demonstrated a concern for and involvement in their community:

I think even just the stuff that she’s involved with and her community work and her views and opinions on the world anyways because she does share a little bit about that. She’s quite a global soul, and I think that it’s really important.

The idea of authenticity and ‘authentic identities’ is much older than the digital ecology, of course, although it has gained a renewed focus in light of new platform practices in the attention economy, such as on TikTok (Cover 2023b). Authenticity is valorised and valued in contemporary culture and serves as a commodity that draws the attention of everyday viewers and users for a few reasons. First, identities (or people) represented as ‘authentic’ are those that are coherent, intelligible and recognisable without logical gaps, anomalies, slippages or complexities while maintaining a groundedness in everyday realities. Politicians, public officials and institutional celebrities are regularly assessed by audiences on authenticity as a means of maintaining consistency across different facets of everyday life and work: holding a policy belief (such as carbon pollution reduction) but not expressing that in everyday life (such as using a private plane) is seen as a breach of authenticity, even if a logical argument for this inconsistency can be given (such as the use of a private jet to enhance security so as better to fight climate change). At a deeper level, more complex identity experiences (such as mixed-race identities) have often been dismissed as somehow inauthentic, leaving large numbers of people perceived as lesser humans because they are unable to represent themselves through a ‘singular’ truth of identity (Radhakrishnan 1996, p. 162).

This notion of consistency across identity, politics and practice was raised by several audience members regarding the influencers they respect and trust. ZB, for example, noted a critical distinction between social media influencers with small and larger followings, the latter who use their accounts for money-making rather than socially concerned messaging:

Influencers with a huge following […] because a lot of the time they’re just doing what the brands told them what they’re getting paid to do. If this is someone more involved in the community, people know them. I guess that’s different.

In this respect, trust among the audience participants tended to be reserved for influencers perceived as maintaining freedom over their content rather than shaping messages in accord with other parties who may be financing them. Their past use of social media for commercial purposes could have a bearing on how the audience receives their message and may influence the level of trust they garner from followers precisely because they are perceived to be inauthentic.

In contrast to the audience’s views, the influencers who participated in the study questioned their identification as ‘trusted messengers’. Jabulani stated that her involvement in the campaign made her realise her potential in this regard:

I didn’t really absorb what that actually meant and understand that I was considered to be a trusted messenger […] I think because I never saw myself as somebody in the community who had a platform or someone who anyone paid attention to or listen to, I just I post so much dumb stuff on my Instagram page that I just didn’t think that it was a platform for sharing serious information and stuff like that so it didn’t really compute until I was making the content.

The influencers interviewed in this study were surprised at being chosen to promote health behaviours because they did not feel they were appropriately qualified to deliver health information and had never done so in the past, thereby putting them in the position of breaching their sense of authenticity, identity and representation because the activity differed substantially from the self-representation they had developed in engagement with their communities, and raised concerns about how their followers would react to sharing ‘serious’ information in contrast to the ‘entertainment’ that was their principal content genre (Cover et al. 2023a). As we will see in the next section, despite the appreciation by audience members who were perhaps more able to critique the conditions of authenticity in the context of the pandemic and health-related communication, the setting provided additional labour for the third-party influencers who had to undertake additional work to manage identity authenticity through maintaining the consistency of their ‘brand’.

Authenticity and the Labour of Maintaining Brand Consistency

As coherence and consistency are key elements in how identity authenticity is constructed and given the greater suspicion of authenticity often applied to minorities, including those from CALD backgrounds, authenticity in the attention economy is a form of additional labour. For influencers, much of this labour is through the development of brands, particularly the consistency of themselves as brands. This is very much aligned with the theoretical understanding in neoliberal and biopolitical cultures of the homo economicus, the entrepreneur of the self, charged with the work of fashioning and representing the self as coherent (Foucault 2008). Given the audience participants’ appreciation of consistency across shared interests as a reason why they returned to particular influencers’ posts, it is unsurprising that several of the influencers expressed uneasiness in posting content that was not aligned with the self-image or brand they had fashioned. As one participant put it: ‘I think the biggest challenge was trying to figure out how I could commit to this project without losing my brand or how do I deliver this in a way that aligns with who I am?’ (Mary). The line between Mary’s online brand as an influencer and her personal identity is evidently blurred, perhaps indicative of a more critical engagement with the concept of authenticity as split between that which she desired in self-representation and that which was fed back to her from her audience.

Influencers also expressed concern about the content potentially ‘not resonating’ with ‘their people’ and not being ‘organic’. They were also worried about being viewed as ‘doing it for the money’, having a lack of ‘authenticity’, being ‘cheesy’, or worse, ‘misleading’. Eufrasia said, ‘People follow me for the music. If I come out with like a message which is misleading, it’s like, well, what’s the point of it?’ The disconnect between the influencers’ regular posts and the commissioned content was a shared concern among the influencers. One poignant example came from Jabulani, whose dissonance stemmed from being required by the management agency to post the health messages to an account she normally limits to posts about her music and upcoming gigs. Followers of this account are her music fans, whereas most of her secondary account followers are parents like her. She felt the health messages she created, which focused on COVID-19 safety protocols for parents of young children, would have been better suited to her secondary account. However, she had been commissioned to post it to her music account, which had a greater number of followers:

I have two Instagram accounts. I have one where I’m a mum, and then I have one where I’m the artist and my artistry. Because I had no gigs, I had nothing coming up, and my only extracurricular activity outside of music was being a parent. It was kind of a bit of a disconnect between sort of connecting with my audience that watch my content for music. (Jabulani)

The example illustrates the challenge the influencers had in developing appropriate health-focused content that met their commissioned brief, while simultaneously aligning it to their followers’ interests. Jabulani was used to generating engagement with her followers and was comfortable developing music and parent-focused content tailored to both accounts.

Perhaps more significantly, however, the example points to the unspoken assumption among those who commission this work that authenticity among CALD influencers is constructed exclusively through the alignment of their ethnic and racial background with that of their followers, representing a target CALD community. Here, the assumption eschews the possibility of opening up intersectionality to mean not only intersectional minority subjectivity (Bell 2013) but the intersection of an identity based on career, posts, influence or – in these influencers’ case – music and comedy and the facets of identification through community, race and ethnicity. In other words, the complaint of these influencers demonstrates how tacit assumptions that CALD minority influencers will connect with their audiences on the basis of community affiliation alone, rather than understanding how intersectionality operates for young people as an anti-normative drive in the pursuit of identity authenticity (Jagose 2015).

Relatability, Representation and Diversity

Finally, we would like to return to how aspects of this kind of campaign operate in the context of the dominance of narrow perceptions of Australianness to be securitised in COVID-19 health information via news and official channels. Here, relatability and representation of diversity are key critical elements for understanding the campaign from the perspective of authenticity. Our audience participants regularly described the campaign’s value in contrast to health information presented in mainstream media, which they felt was broadly unrepresentative of their social, cultural, or ethnic backgrounds. Three participants highlighted the continuing need to advance the inclusivity and representation of health messaging in mainstream media. For example, Abdul said, ‘We need to cover everyone and make sure everyone feels kind of in it together and united’. ZB highlighted the lack of diversity in mainstream media, pointing to a vaccination promotion advertisement produced by Channel Nine (television) called ‘This is our shot’. The promotion featured several of the channel’s prominent white TV personalities advocating for COVID-19 vaccinations. The promotion has been criticised for lacking ethnic and racial diversity (The West Australian 2021). ZB provided nuanced, critical comments on the danger associated with ‘whitewashing’ health information in this way and described the Channel Nine promotion as counterintuitive, potentially negatively influencing vaccination uptake. Many, therefore, felt that the campaign was a necessary starting point for redressing the lack of representation of diversity in mainstream health communication efforts but not a comprehensive solution.

The audience also outlined the need for marginal positionalities to be represented in health communication campaigns collaborating with influencers. In contrast to mainstream sources of health information, some participants described the influencers as ‘people just like us’ and ‘my people’. For instance, Kelly said she would not have engaged with the campaign if the influencer, Mary, had not been involved:

If they're wanting to communicate these messages to younger people and, like, help young people understand what's going on in the world maybe having younger people in the videos and having people of other cultures as well in the videos […] because I wouldn't have ever engaged in this if [Mary] didn't share this, because a lot of the time you see the same type of people, the same demographic of people. So, I think making sure they diversify the content that they're creating, and having different age groups, having different ethnicities, and different like genders as well. (Kelly)

Abdul similarly highlighted the value of influencers from ethnic minorities to enhance relatability:

I think especially getting someone from […] an ethnic background is also good, because then they can relate to like maybe the minorities as well, which might not

–

they might not be a normal targeted audience. (Abdul)

In this context, what the influencer and audience participants demonstrate is a complex negotiation between the need for relatable content where identities are shared across communities that include influencer and audience, but also the need for a more nuanced approach to authenticity that takes into account how relatability is not exclusively about ethnic or racial identity but incorporates intersectional practices related to the brand.

Conclusion

This study revealed several core considerations that need to be taken into account by multiple parties, whether that is government agencies hiring third-party influencers for targeted messaging to hardly reached communities, audiences (and scholars) considering minority influencers’ construction of selfhood and identity in relation to their audience engagement, and management agents directing minority influencers in the construction of messages and the choice of the account setting in which to post. As we have argued, the urgency of the campaign was a likely reason why a more nuanced, sensitive and participatory approach was not taken by all parties.

Identity authenticity is complex and made more so within affective capitalism and the contemporary digital ecology (Arnesson 2022). Both the influencers and the audience members offered critical commentary on the challenges of producing identity authenticity across issues of trust, brand consistency and diverse representation, but broadly acknowledged that in the context of a lack of mainstream media diversity, the problem of authenticity sat alongside the substantial benefits of at least some relatability along identity axes of race and ethnicity.

This study adds the importance of an influencer’s involvement in community work as a key indicator of trustworthiness and authenticity for CALD youth audiences. Like the constant identity work found among social media influencers who professionalise their authenticity (Long and Wilhoit 2018), renegotiating their brand to be recognised as a ‘trusted messenger’ of health information created tensions for some influencers in the current study. The influencers in this study were initially sceptical of their qualifications to deliver a health message, given their typical content related to the fields of music, arts, and popular entertainment. However, the participants universally felt health-related content worked best when it aligned with the influencers’ usual content. Therefore, the findings point to the importance of third-party campaigns built on collaboration that effectively recognises and utilises the expertise of the influencer (in content design suited to their audience) and the health promotion professional (in the provision of accurate health information). This aligns with evidence that emphasises socially and culturally appropriate communication and draws on specialised and trusted expertise among the key features of community-specific communication infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic (Mamalipurath and Notley 2022).

Despite the lack of inclusion on social media platforms of diverse and intersectional identities, participants in the current study chose to follow the influencers because they were relatable. What is clear across both sets of interviewees, however, is that a more nuanced appreciation of intersectionality would be beneficial not only to the campaign but to the parties involved. The ‘intersectional turn’ in health inequalities literature predominantly focuses on intersectionality’s explanatory power for how health outcomes manifest differently for those experiencing intersectional forms of dis/advantage (Bambra 2022). However, intersectionality can also effectively guide health promotion practice to ensure that health communication is enhanced for those most in need (proportionalism) (Bambra and Marmot 2023). With evidence pointing to the failures of governments to learn the lessons from past pandemics (Bambra and Marmot 2023), we must not fail to learn from the COVID-19 health communication response.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The limitations and criticisms of this social category are noted here, including that as an umbrella ‘catch-all’ term, the use of CALD risks masking a myriad of social locations – and subsequently, masks unique interactions of structural drivers of inequity – and is also typically applied in Australian policy and services to those seen as, or assumed to be, racially different from white Australians, reinforcing hegemonic whiteness (Maturi and Munro 2022). The designation of CALD in this paper is influenced by the project under evaluation, which was designed and named by actors within state government.

2 Pseudonyms have been used that mirror names commonly found in their communities.

3 Ethics approval was obtained from RMIT University’s Human Research Ethics Committee. Data has been handled according to strict anonymity due to the influencers’ public profiles and ongoing contractual work with the intermediary agency involved in the creative production of the videos. We agreed not to quote social media content directly or refer to specific social media channels or platform spaces that may identify the participants.