Abstract:

In recent years, social media applications have been remarkably used in providing political information and participation. Social media is approached as a new meeting area where political actors and voters interact in political communication. Politicians actively and effectively use this medium during and beyond their election campaigns, particularly YouTube, which allows to see the number of views, the opportunity to comment on the videos and direct sharing. This article analyses the use of YouTube as a political communication medium by Turkey’s five most popular political parties represented in the Grand National Assembly; AK Party, CHP, HDP, MHP and IYI Party; during March 31, 2019 Local Elections. The sample of this research consists of 120 political advertisements published on these political parties’ official YouTube channels. The political advertisements were analysed by content analysis technique as a qualitative research method. According to the findings, the parties mostly prefer positive advertising language as an election strategy. In addition, we determined that the political advertisements published by CHP were closed to user interaction, and the other parties did not publish replies to the user comments on their advertisements. In sum, this paper argues that the parties utilized YouTube for promotion purposes in the same way as traditional media tools during this election period.

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