CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Akimzhanov, Maksat |
|---|---|
| Title | Manipulating Narratives: Authoritarian Legitimization through Social Media Propaganda in Kazakhstan |
| Summary | It is now easy to observe such trends when digital social networks have literally integrated into modern society and can fully shape and influence public opinion depending on the information that circulates on these platforms. Given the changes taking place, it is essential to improve our understanding of how authoritarian countries manage to survive and maintain the legitimacy of their regime even in the face of various crises that may potentially occur within the country. This study aims to explore rhetorical framing strategies in social media through which Kazakhstan’s regime exercises narrative control and manipulation as tools to legitimize its authoritarian rule, thereby shedding light on how national identity construction can enable autocracies to adapt. Specifically, the research analyzes legitimation strategies of Kazakhstani pro-government channels on Telegram before and after the Bloody January 2022 mass protests (critical juncture), using comparative quantitative content analysis (frame analysis). By gathering and examining a total of 1000 Telegram publications distributed between 2019 and 2025 across 5 major pro-government Kazakhstani channels such as Tengrinews, Zakon.kz, ZTB News, Kazinform, and Qazaqstan.tv, the study identifies 3 main recurring legitimacy-based themes as performance/output, legal/procedural, moral/identity, and 3 additional legitimacy-based sub-themes as international/external, participatory/input, charismatic/personalist; carefully categorizes each Telegram publication by a rhetorical theme and examines how the thematical distribution changed after the crisis happened. The study reveals that, after the January 2022 crisis, pro-government channels reduced the use of performance/output frames, increased the number of moral/identity frames and kept legal/procedural frames unchanged. Therefore, the content of Telegram publications around national identity construction basically displaced the content which solely focused on tangible performance outputs. |
| Supervisor | Bremer, Björn; Melnykovska, Inna |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/akimzhanov_maksat.pdf |
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