The health crisis on Instagram: how the media are building their agenda on the visual social network during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Over the last decade social networks have become important channels for the media to publish information and communicate with their younger audi­ences, with Instagram recently becom­ing the most popular platform for this purpose. This article is an investigation into news production on this social net­work in the context of the international crisis generated by the COVID-19 pan­demic, by means of a content analysis of 552 posts published by the two most widely read Spanish newspapers. The results suggest that despite there being a large quantity of soft content and hu­man-interest stories, as found in previ­ous research, Instagram is also used as a platform to distribute information of public interest about the management of the crisis (such as political decisions and health content).