TRUSTEDD BACKGROUND

Sharing specialised knowledge with the general public in the digital context often requires overcoming significant information gaps through creative multimodal resources and discursive strategies. Experts and mediators must transform complex scientific concepts into accessible formats while navigating the unique challenges of online communication. A central factor in this digital outreach is the cultivation of trust, which functions across epistemological, relational, and institutional levels to ensure information is received as credible. Although sociological and communication studies frequently examine this phenomenon, there remains a distinct need to analyse the discursive mechanisms used to make expert knowledge trustworthy.

In the current context of information overload and misinformation we seek to explore how expert disseminators use linguistic, pragmatic, and multimodal mechanisms to project a trustworthy voice helping (non-)expert audiences discern reliable knowledge from misleading claims.