Using Social Media for Mandarin-speaking and Arabic-speaking Communities in the COVID-19 Pandemic

This research aims to understand the challenges for government and community workers in communicating information about COVID-19 to Mandarin- and Arabic-speaking communities after the outbreak of the pandemic. The study, focused between March 2020 and July 2021, argues that government staff and bilingual community workers acted as intermediaries who addressed the cultural and linguistic needs of these communities. I discuss how offline and online social networks enhanced peoples’ health literacy and media literacy, working with Bourdieu’s (1986) concepts of social capital and cultural capital. Recognising the importance of communities’ uses of digital and online media, I adopt Ragnedda’s (2018) theory that a community’s digital capital is an independent resource. In this study, I conducted semi-structured interviews online via Zoom with staff from a local health district of the NSW Department of Health and bilingual community workers from these communities who were tasked with distributing COVID-19 information. I found that bilingual community workers were an essential resource for communication with the communities. The intermediaries reported that reasonable health literacy and media literacy could empower the communities in identifying reliable information and countering misinformation. A key finding of this research was that digital competencies for both the health staff and community members were important in dealing with the health emergency of COVID-19. This aligns with Ragnedda’s (2018) argument that digital capital should be considered as an independent form of capital that can be converted into social capital and cultural capital. While the intermediaries were able to capitalise on the existing three forms of capital to an extent, they nevertheless indicated the need for enhanced health, media, and digital literacy for communities