Authority Building

The strategies used by content creators and platforms to establish trustworthiness and expertise, particularly for health-related and disability-related content. Authority building techniques include disclosing professional credentials, citing authoritative sources, displaying platform verification badges, referencing peer-reviewed research, and sharing relevant lived experience. In disability communities on video platforms, authority building presents unique tensions—clinical authority may be valued for medical accuracy but criticized for lacking lived experience perspective, while personal experience authority may be questioned for lacking clinical rigor.