Politicial communation pratice of politicial actors in the Covid-19pandemic process: Twitter example

Social media is an important factor in political communication these days. It has come forward due to possibilities it provides besides tradational media, for political figures to keep communicating with the masses. Hence social media, among the political communication mediums, and especiallt Twitter, contributes in determination of the agenda. Points such as how often political figures tweet and with which content, and how much they receive support and interaction due to their tweets, present data about political communication strategies. This work focuses on an agenda limited to the topics of health and pandemic in the first two months of the Covid-19 pandemic (when there was observed a noticable amount of public anxiety) about how the political figures did a political communication strategy. In the research, analysis unit, is to investigate the political communication on Twitter between the dates March 10th 2020 and May 10th 2020 of the following four political party leaders: Ak Parti Genel Başkanı Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi Genel Başkanı Devlet Bahçeli, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi Genel Başkanı Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu ve IYI Parti Genel Başkanı Meral Akşener. Hence it is intended to present how the parties adapted to the "new" situation and how they managed a political communication strategy, in the agenda restricted to the subjects of pandemic and health. Data in the study has been analyzed in an interpretive way using a qualitative content analysis. In this respect, the goal that this study is trying to achieve is that to present the relation between the meaning behind the tweets of political figures and pandemic. In this study, in the first two months of the pandemic it has been observed that, despite the disadvantages of the pandemic, political figures used Twitter actively to continue their roles as the ruling party and opposition parties.