Aikerim Bektemirova analysed 120 posts on the social media platform ‘Threads’, focusing on Kazakhstan’s March referendum. Her findings reveal that critical narratives spread further than supportive ones. Here, she argues that digital platforms amplify emotional and confrontational content, creating unbalanced online political debate
We often imagine digital platforms as spaces for open, balanced political debate. Evidence from Kazakhstan’s constitutional referendum suggests a more complex reality. While platforms like Threads enable the emergence of alternative and counter-hegemonic narratives, they do not do so neutrally. What emerges instead is a kind of amplified asymmetry, where certain narratives and emotions travel further than others.
This asymmetry operates at three levels: volume (a higher number of critical posts), visibility (much higher engagement) and tone (often emotional and confrontational). Higher levels of critical content may reflect broader public dissatisfaction with the reform. Yet the disproportionate engagement it receives suggests that platform dynamics are also important for amplifying certain narratives and tones.
In Kazakhstan, state-owned and pro-government outlets dominate the traditional media landscape. In a space long shaped by official narratives, this dynamic is especially important. Here, the newer platform Threads emerged rapidly in 2025 as an alternative space. Users perceive fewer constraints on Threads, and feel it offers greater visibility for dissenting voices.
Threads has emerged rapidly as an alternative media space in Kazakhstan. Users perceive fewer constraints and feel it offers greater visibility for dissenting voices
Part of this shift is platform-specific. Unlike more established social media platforms, Threads initially lacked entrenched influencers, clear norms or strong content hierarchies. Kazakhstani users describe it as a space where 'anyone can say anything' and be heard. This perceived openness has encouraged the rapid appearance of raw, unfiltered and often critical forms of expression. Algorithmic dynamics amplify this. The highly active Kazakhstani users producing Russian-language content have also been widely recommended across the Threads platform, extending these discussions' visibility beyond local audiences.
My research draws on an original dataset of 120 Threads posts in the period leading up to Kazakhstan's constitutional referendum on 15 March 2026. Here, I reveal how digital discourse in a hybrid political regime became not merely oppositional, but skewed toward certain types of critique.
The first striking pattern is the imbalance of sentiment. Nearly 70% of posts expressed critical views of the forthcoming referendum. Positive and neutral posts made up only around 15% each.
Prior to the recent Kazakhstan referendum, critical posts on Threads generated over eight times more engagement than pro-government and pro-referendum content
Critical posts generated, on average, over eight times more engagement than pro-government and pro-referendum content. So, while supportive narratives struggled to gain traction, critical content consistently dominated every metric, including the likes, comments and shares. In one striking case, a single highly emotional post, which questioned the referendum’s legitimacy and called for collective reflection, was sent over 1,400 times. Clearly, critical content circulates through private networks as much as public endorsement.
Not all critical narratives perform equally. Certain frames are especially powerful in capturing attention:
Combined, the critical frames quite clearly dominated the discourse, accounting for more than half of all posts (60%) in the dataset. Pro-government frames (22%), which viewed the referendum as a genuine evolution of the state towards 'democratic progress' or as a necessary step to ensure the country’s 'stability', remained marginal and weakly engaged with. Some such pro-government posts generated discussion, but not endorsement, attracting comments rather than likes, which reflect contestation rather than agreement. In other words, people respond, but do not support.
The dynamics of engagement are not driven by narrative alone. How a person says something matters just as much as what they say. Two tones dominate the dataset: emotional expression (over one-third of posts, or 36.7%) and confrontational language (around 28.3%). Together, these account for nearly two-thirds (65%) of all content.
In practice, different tones generate different forms of engagement. Confrontational posts get significantly more engagement (an average of 2,093 total engagements per post), mainly through likes (average 1,977). Confrontational posts generate nearly three times more engagement than emotional (average 781) or informational (average 757) posts. At the same time, the emotional posts are more likely to drive discussion and sharing, encouraging users to comment and repost, indicating that disagreement spreads differently from endorsement.
Sarcastic posts are less frequent, at 12.5% of all content. These tend to be some of the most politically pointed, functioning as a compact and highly effective form of dissent: 86.7% of all sarcastic posts are critical. Even posts coded as 'informational' (22.5 % of all content) are often not neutral. Nearly half (48%) of posts coded as 'informational' still carry critical sentiment. Conversely, 15.5% of all critical posts adopt an informational tone, suggesting that factual language also functions as a vehicle for critique.
These findings have broader implications for how we understand political communication in hybrid regimes like Kazakhstan, where state influence often shapes traditional media environments. In contexts where formal democratic competition is limited, and where traditional media remain structured by official narratives, online spaces and digital platforms like Threads are important arenas for contestation.
Traditional media often remain constrained by official narratives. Digital platforms like Threads have therefore become important arenas for contestation
They could also enable the rise of counter-discourses, albeit not in a neutral or balanced way. Instead, these platforms tend to tend to promote critical and emotional content more than balanced or reasoned discussion.
While this analysis focuses on a single case, the implications extend beyond it. As digital platforms like Threads become central to political communication worldwide, understanding which voices are amplified and why becomes increasingly important. In this sense, digital platforms do not simply open space for alternative voices. Perhaps more importantly, they can also reshape the conditions for the visibility of those voices. The result is not a level playing field. It is a reconfigured one.
