Information Under Pressure: Research on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
On 13 April 2026, the European Neighbourhood Council (ENC) unveiled the findings of the study “Information Under Pressure: Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan”, under the Cultivating Audience Resilience through Amplification of Vibrant and Authentic Narratives (CARAVAN) project, funded by EU and implemented by Internews Europe.
The study utilised a mixed-methods approach, combining AI-assisted analysis of 3,008 narrative instances, identified from over 580,000 collected posts with qualitative insights from fourteen expert interviews and structured roundtable discussions with media professionals across Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Monitoring was conducted between October 2025 and February 2026, tracking 32 distinct narratives across platforms including Telegram, YouTube, and Facebook. The findings identify Russia as the primary external information actor in the region, with its messaging largely focused on delegitimising Western institutions and depicting the West as a power in terminal decline.
The report highlights structurally different FIMI environments, noting that Kazakhstan faces interference specifically calibrated to domestic political vulnerabilities, whereas Uzbekistan encounters more transnational narratives regarding global geopolitical competition. Despite producing a lower volume of narrative instances, Uzbekistan saw 26 percent more total views than Kazakhstan, reaching 17.7 million views across its amplifier networks. To counter these threats, the study proposes key recommendations such as increasing high-quality Kazakh- and Uzbek-language content, expanding monitoring to platforms like TikTok and Threads, and moving toward proactive resilience-building in editorial standards.
