Comunidades Informadas
El Tímpano’s community-centered approach to combat misinformation in Latino and Mayan immigrant communities
Among immigrant communities, Facebook pages, WhatsApp group chats, and church services are often more accessible and trusted sources of information than news outlets or medical authorities. As Maria González told El Tímpano in January when she and her family were sick with COVID-19, WhatsApp chats with relatives were among the few sources she had for medical advice. Not because she didn’t trust health authorities, but because she didn’t have a relationship with one herself, or a clear way to contact one now that her family was sick. She knew that the home remedies her in-laws offered were questionable, but she said, reflecting on her own experience, “people just hear things, and do what they do because they don’t have any information.”
The pandemic has put an overdue spotlight on this vacuum of trusted and reliable information among Latino immigrants and many communities of color. It has been a source of inequities in access to testing and vaccine sites, contributed to the spread of unproven and in some cases dangerous home remedies to prevent or treat the virus, and led to distrust of the vaccine (though the latter is not nearly as common as the media has made it out to be).
How, then, can news outlets — or any organization — prevent and counter misinformation circulating in immigrant communities?
This is the question El Tímpano seeks to answer through a new initiative called Comunidades Informadas (“informed communities”). Inspired by the promotoras model of public health education, we believe that the answer lies not within our own institution, but within the communities we serve, in which hundreds of individuals day in and day out play a role as trusted messengers for their own families, apartment complexes, or workplaces. We are going to the communities we serve — Latino and Mayan immigrants — to learn how they are affected by misinformation, and designing popular education and participatory media that will equip them to recognize it and halt its spread.
Head over to El Tímpano’s Medium page to learn more about this initiative, which is supported thanks to a grant from the California Health Care Foundation. If your organization is interested in bringing our workshop to its members, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us at hola@eltimpano.org.
