Political communication and politainment in social media: Thematic analysis of social media posts in 2019 local elections in the context of politainment

The place of entertainment in human life is increasing day by day. The changing structure of the society over time has also changed the entertainment culture. Technological developments, especially in mass media, have made it easier to access entertaining content and have made entertainment a significant part of life. Content like music, movies, videos, games have become one of the daily activities. This interest of people has increased the use of entertainment in politics as well as in fields like education, news and advertising. The phenomenon of "politainment", which expresses the transfer of political content in an entertaining way, has been preferred by the media and politics as an important political communication method since ancient times. While politics tends to use the element of entertainment in order to gain the support of the voters, to gain the power of power, and to draw people who have moved away from politics into political discussions; On the other hand, the media frequently uses the entertainment phenomenon in order to increase the customer base and gain competitive power. Social media has led to a significant change in political communication. The society, which could not make its voice heard in the traditional media, became more involved in the political communication process in the social media. Therefore, a new platform has emerged in which the media, politics and society are involved. This platform has made it possible to detect the use of politainment by a large audience. The study aims to collect data on the use of politainment in this new medium, including the community. In this direction, the posts on Twitter regarding the 23 June 2019 Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality elections were examined by thematic content analysis method. As a result of the examination, it has been determined that 5% of the posts about Binali Yıldırım and 8% of the posts about Ekrem Imamoglu have Politainment content. Politainment-related posts are grouped under three themes: election results, criticism, and other posts. These are mostly seen in order to criticize, convey information and support parties.