Politics

This Chapter focuses on the brokering of Philippine politics on YouTube. We zoom in on how political influencers, well-versed with platform vernaculars, affordances, and porous governance structures, create content that convey hyper-partisan political narratives advancing a historical revisionist and political agenda. The chapter showcases how Filipino YouTubers mobilise affective aspirations on the nostalgia of a progressive state during the regime of the late dictator and former President Ferdinand Marcos, while dismissing the documented violent atrocities surrounding that political regime thereby facilitating political discourses in favor of the reinstatement of another Marcos to the Presidency. By purporting to be the “voices from the margins” and facilitating “illusions of discovery,” the parasocial relationships developed by YouTubers along with the platform’s participatory and “epistemic cultures” gives them the legitimacy to construct their version of political history while brokering a connection between YouTube voter publics and political actors.