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

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).