This study examines how acts of helping are transformed into political performance on Indonesian YouTube, focusing on Dedi Mulyadi’s official YouTube channel. In contemporary platform politics, political visibility is increasingly produced through affective encounters, everyday narratives, and emotionally charged representations of ordinary citizens. Rather than treating charity-oriented political content as merely personal goodwill or public service, this study analyses how poverty, compassion, and proximity to “the people” are mediated, aestheticised, and circulated as forms of platform populism.

Using qualitative content analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, the study examines selected YouTube videos featuring encounters between Dedi Mulyadi and socially vulnerable citizens, including poor families, informal workers, elderly people, and marginalised individuals. The analysis focuses on narrative structure, visual framing, emotional cues, interactional performance, and audience engagement. The study argues that the “politics of helping” operates through three interconnected mechanisms: the personalisation of political authority, the emotional staging of poverty, and the conversion of compassion into digital visibility and political legitimacy.

The findings are expected to contribute to discussions on digital populism, affective labour, and political communication in Southeast Asia. By situating Indonesian political YouTube within the broader dynamics of platform capitalism, the study shows how suffering can become both a moral appeal and a communicative resource. This paper highlights the ambivalence of compassionate political performance: while it may generate public attention toward social inequality, it may also individualise structural problems and turn poverty into consumable political content.

Authors:
Shela Kusumaningtyas, University of Indonesia, Indonesia

About the Presenter(s)
Shela Kusumaningtyas, MA student in Communication Science at Universitas Indonesia & LPDP awardee. Interests: media, digital platforms, policy communication, semiotics. Project: transmedia storytelling of disability policy on Kemenhub’s Instagram/You

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shela-kusumaningtyas?originalSubdomain=id

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