The aim of this study was to explore the COVID-19 pandemic social representation in the early stages of its development. Following a free association task and a categorical analysis, a corpus of COVID-19-related editorial illustrations from articles posted by leading French newspapers was collected. Iconographic analysis of editorial illustrations revealed 12 iconic patterns that seemed typical of the pandemic iconography. Findings suggest that articles eliciting the greatest engagement (i.e. reactions, comments, and shares) are those that use a stable iconography so that the topic can easily be identified by most Facebook users. Therefore, these images could play an important role in the objectification process development of the COVID-19 social representation. Future studies should therefore explore the impact of the relationship between the news media and their audiences on the visual representation of highly topical issues, in the light of the objectification process of social representation theory.

本研究的目的是探讨 COVID-19 大流行在其发展早期阶段的社会代表性。经过自由联想任务和分类分析，从法国主要报纸发布的文章中收集了与 COVID-19 相关的社论插图语料库。对社论插图的图像分析揭示了 12 种典型的流行病图像的标志性图案。研究结果表明，引发最大参与度（即反应、评论和分享）的文章是那些使用稳定图像的文章，以便大多数 Facebook 用户可以轻松识别该主题。因此，这些图像可以在 COVID-19 社会表征的客观化过程发展中发挥重要作用。因此，未来的研究应该根据社会表征理论的客观化过程，探讨新闻媒体与其受众之间的关系对高度话题性问题的视觉表征的影响。