Politics and communication work cyclically to determine the practices pertaining to political communication in a society. The practices embodied in political communication intermingle through symbols, values, words, and ideological patterns established or reproduced in relation to each individual’s interpretation of the same. Among the different political communication activities, the process of conducting election campaigns has been transformed considerably into one in which symbols, meanings, and signs are established by means of tools such as posters, commercials, and brochures for political candidates and parties. However, the goal of such communication is to reach out to large masses as well as individuals from specific constituencies and influence their ideological and political determinations in the media and society. Today, the political communication practices are largely characterized by technological innovations. Election campaigns are now organized extensively on social media platforms and reinterpreted based on these channels. When social media strategies are implemented as a means to facilitate political communication in addition to traditional mass media practices, the influence of political communication activities typically spreads across larger populations, influencing political turnouts and contributing to the effectiveness of the campaign.

The state of humanitarian boundaries and its relevance in international politics turned into a deadlock over the Cyprus Problem, subjecting the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) to a recurrent practice of political communication based on discourse, myth,and signs centered on the Cyprus Problem. Political communication in Northern Cyprus has transformed significantly, facilitating access to larger masses and more groups by means of technology. With the use of political communication language, which is evident in critical political processes, the visibility of political candidates has spiraled, particularly on social media.

The number of published studies on the effect of social media on political communication processes is particularly striking. “The Effects of Facebook as a Political Communication Tool on the Voting Decision of the Voters: The Early General Elections of the TRNC 2013 Parliamentary Elections,” published by Arslan & Seçim (2015), revealed that 88.5% of the voters who used social media were influenced by the messages they had come across on Facebook during the voting period. However, Kurban (2014) examined the social media strategies of two parties, namely, the National Unity Party and the Republican Turkish Party-United Powers. In his study “The Use of Social Media in the Process of Election Campaigns and A Look at the TRNC General Elections on July 28, 2013,” Kurban described these parties as having played active roles in the country’s administration. Similarly, in his play “Political Communication in Transforming Media: on October 8, 2017, and January 2018 TRNC Early General Elections in Facebook Media,” Güler (2018) looks at the effect of Facebook on political communication. Based on these aforementioned viewpoints, the critical election processes governing TRNC’s political communication reveal that the social media acts as a catalyst in areas where it is used effectively. The primary objective of these studies is to approach the political communication process through social media platforms and strategies. However, another common denominator characterizing these studies is that they remain limited in terms of analyzing the messages being conveyed these advertisements pertaining to political communication. Therefore, this study aims to emphasize the meaning dimensions, as opposed to the instrumental dimensions, of political communication.

Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to analyze the messages being conveyed by the candidate advertisement videos published on social media in the context of the TRNC Presidential elections held in 2020. Such an analysis is considered an important threshold in terms of political communication as well as for the purpose of considering these advertisements as “texts” and interpreting the indicators through discourse analyses. However, the research questions that the study seeks answers pertain to the indicators used in the 2020 Presidential elections; the political advertisement videos published on social media; the connotations and denotations established in the process; and the choice of words used in political advertising videos. The research also questions what interpretations can be drawn through the current language used in the TRNC political communication. This study is analyzed by the semiotic signification order used by Barthes (1977). The semiotic analysis is accompanied by the critical discourse analysis by Van Dijk; which is based on semantic and syntactic analyses.

The main findings of this study reveal that the political advertising videos broadcast on social media are based on the Cyprus Problem as a meta-discourse. These political advertising videos are reproduced around the ideological contexts of the candidates by referring to the current political events around phenomena such as future, freedom, democracy, and independence fed by historical narratives from the past. In particular, it is observed that word choices such as “struggle,” “willpower,” “independence,” “freedom,” and “democracy” are used as common concepts independent of the candidate’s right–left ideological determination. Another finding of this study is the predominance of the “us” language in the videos. It is observed that the mentioned word choices are reproduced by a polarizing discourse construction around the language of “us.”