A Critical Reading on the Visual Production of Infodemic

The problematic relationship between communication technologies and information is among the essential discussion topics of the academy. Concepts such as information bombardment, disinformation, and misinformation refer to incorrect, distorted, and corrupt information disseminated by means of communication. Unhealthy information and knowledge are seen as the biggest obstacle to the formation of a healthy public opinion. In the Covid 19 epidemic, which affects the whole world, the relationship between communication tools and information has come to the fore again. An "infodemic," which can be defined as "false, distorted information epidemic/pandemic," describes the truly distant information flowing to the public about the Covid 19 pandemic through different communication tools. On the other hand, today, visual images have become the most crucial source in disseminating information and the production of meaning. With digitalization, our daily life is shaped by an image-filled culture surrounded by artificial visuals more than ever before. The curiosity of this work is "How is infodemic produced through visual images?" It is based on the question. For this purpose, Twitter has been chosen as the research universe of important social networking sites. The study showed how the infodemia spread about Covid 19 vaccine in Turkey was produced visually on Twitter and analyzed with content analysis. The critical visual literacy method proposed by Douglas Kellner was adopted for analysis. In line with the suggestion of Kellner, the political, ideological, religious, and so on semantic load has been tried to be interpreted.