This Is What Pandemic Looks Like: Visual Framing of COVID-19 on Search Engines

Makhortykh, Mykola; Urman, Aleksandra; Ulloa, Roberto (2023). This Is What Pandemic Looks Like: Visual Framing of COVID-19 on Search Engines. In: Vakoch, Douglas A.; Pollock, John C.; Caleb, Amanda M. (eds.) COVID Communication: Exploring Pandemic Discourse (pp. 113-123). Springer 10.1007/978-3-031-27665-1_9

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In this chapter, we conduct a comparative analysis of how different search engines prioritize visual information related to COVID-19 and what consequences it has for the representation of the pandemic. Our interest in the visuality of COVID-19 is attributed to images being an effective means of communicating complex phenomena that are hard to express verbally. Furthermore, the potential of images for stirring emotional responses makes them a potent catalyst of societal mobilization at the time of crisis but also results in their frequent (ab)use for manipulating public opinion. We looked at how classic news frames (e.g., the attribution of responsibility, human interest, and economics) are used in relation to COVID-19 and how their visual composition varies between the search engines. Our preliminary findings indicate significant differences in the use of frames such as the less pronounced use of classic news frames in English and Russian compared with Chinese.

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