Popular and on the Rise—But Not Everywhere: COVID-19-Infographics on Twitter

The coronavirus pandemic has altered many industries around the world. Journalism is one of them. Especially data journalists have gained attention within and outside of their newsrooms. We aim to study the prevalence of journalistic data visualizations before and after COVID-19 in 1.9 million image posts of news organizations on Twitter across six countries using a semi-manual detection approach. We find an increase in the shares of tweets containing infographics. Although this effect is not consistent across countries, we find increases in the prevalence of COVID-19-related content and interactions in infographics throughout all geographies. This study helps to generalize existing qualitative research on a larger, international scale.