SOCIAL MEDIA OF YOUTH POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS IN TIMES OF COVID-19

The current setup of society requires all entities that want to maintain their existence and potentially grow, to use online communication tools. These allow them to share various messages, gain new customers / clients, and keep those up to date. This trend did not escape the political sphere either, and thus also political parties or several youth organizations operating alongside them. The aim of this paper is to identify the use of online communication tools of youth organizations of political parties in Slovakia and to characterize the form of communicated content in relation to topic of COVID-19. For the purpose of fulfilling this goal, youth organizations are monitored, which are linked to relevant (parliamentary) political parties. Relevant online communication platforms - websites and social networks - serve as a source of data. We have included several categories of research: the existence of own website, the link from own website to social networks, the existence of a blog on the website, the types of social networks used, the division of contributions according to topics (COVID-19 included) and promotion of the organization, the rate of publication of posts (COVID-19 posts vs. others), the rate of interactions (COVID-19 posts vs. others), monitoring the relationships between types of interactions and differentiation of the rate of interactions according to the type of published contribution (COVID-19 posts vs others). The data are processed by descriptive statistics and, in the case of monitoring relationships and their extent, also through advanced statistical analyzes (correlation analysis, CrossTabs). The results show active use of the website and the social network Facebook. Promotion predominates over the communication of social and political topics. The interaction rate on posts increases with the number of other second interactions. The form of the contribution does not directly affect the number of interactions.