The Sociopolitical January 2022 Protests in Kazakhstan’s Telegram Channels: Agenda Interception

Contemporary sociopolitical processes do not take place in a vacuum: they are interpreted and covered by various social media, from the internet-based applications to platforms. These include social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, microblogging platforms such as Twitter, photo- and video-sharing services such as Instagram and YouTube, messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and community-based forums such as Reddit. As such, there is a big difference between what is happening de facto and how the event is interpreted by individual agents. The research aims to analyze the trends and features of media content coverage by government and nongovernment channels during the period of social and political protest escalation in Kazakhstan, based on the materials of Telegram platform publications. To achieve the research objectives, the following methods were used: quantitative analysis of arrays using time series, content analysis of publications, and thematic modeling. The research determined that the protests that took place in Kazakhstan in January 2022 are of interest specifically in terms of how they were shaped in the environment of Telegram, an anonymous messenger known as a means of communication in the protests. Telegram is one of the platforms in which both authorial and state actors are closely intertwined; the research studied how protests were structured in the two “camps,” as well as the specifics of informing the audience using the Python programming language. The data demonstrates a significant difference in the frequency of coverage in favor of nonstate channels, despite a qualitative difference in the vocabulary used and the main “stories.”