This is what pandemic looks like: Visual framing of COVID-19 on search engines

In today’s high-choice media environment, search engines such as Google play an integral role in informing individuals and societies about the latest events. Using complex algorithms, search engines filter and rank sources to supply their users with most relevant information. The importance of search algorithms is even higher at the time of crisis, when users search for information to understand the causes and the consequences of the current situation and decide on their course of action. In our paper, 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 which 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 the public opinion. To investigate how search algorithms visualize the pandemic, we simulated simultaneous search activity on six search engines - Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and Baidu - using bots (n=200). Specifically, we used image search for the term “coronavirus” in English, Russian and Chinese and retrieved the first 50 images Then, we used qualitative content analysis to investigate visual frames - i.e. recurring patterns of representation - constructed by the search algorithms. In particular, 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, for instance, less pronounced use of classic news frames in English and Russian compared with Chinese.