The authors selected Instagram because it combines curated visual self-presentation with public interaction. Posts, captions, hashtags, stories, reels and comment sections make it possible to observe both how identities are displayed and how audiences respond to them. The purposive sample included Kazakh-speaking, Russian-speaking and bilingual accounts from major cities and the northern, southern, western and eastern regions of Kazakhstan. Its 45 accounts comprised 10 national influencers, 8 moral entrepreneurs, 7 civic or news hubs, 5 linguistic activists, 8 ordinary Russophone users and 7 ordinary Kazakh-speaking users. Posts were eligible only if they had at least 50 comments, creating an “interaction-rich corpus” intended to expose language policing, moral judgement and collective sanction.

That threshold also defines the study’s most important limitation: it favors visible, controversial or already highly engaged content. The reported percentages therefore describe the selected sample rather than estimate the prevalence of language policing, shaming or moral regulation across Instagram in Kazakhstan. Quieter accounts, private communication and less visible forms of identity performance were less accessible. The researchers also excluded private, anonymous, inactive, commercial, automated and purely promotional accounts, as well as foreign content using Kazakhstan-related hashtags only to attract global engagement. The data collection covered public posts, first 50 comments per selected post, visible engagement metrics where available, and contextual information such as dates, location tags, hashtags and public events.

Each post received one dominant identity-performance category based on its combined visual framing, language, caption, symbols and cultural references. Hybrid posts joined national ornaments or family customs with contemporary clothing, cosmopolitan lifestyles and urban scenes. Their captions commonly combined Kazakh, Russian, English, slang or “shala-Kazakh,” a mixed form of Kazakh and Russian associated in the analysis with flexible, contemporary speech. Traditional posts foregrounded continuity through the “shapan” and “saukele,” rural or nomadic landscapes, ceremonies, family values, religious morality and high-register Kazakh. Modern or decolonial posts used minimalist design, Latin script, “Q” or “Qazaq” branding and explicit language-justice themes to portray Kazakh identity as contemporary, sovereign and distinct from Soviet and Russophone frames. Religious and moral content was coded as a cross-cutting attribute rather than a fourth performance type.

Audience responses revealed a dual structure of digital nationalism in the sampled interactions. At the post-thread level, 203 of the 390 threads, or 52%, had predominantly positive responses marked by approval, solidarity or civic pride. Another 66 threads, or 17%, were classified as predominantly explicit criticism, shaming or “uyat”-based judgment. The remaining 121 threads, or 31%, were neutral, ambivalent or mixed. Positive comments included collective expressions of Kazakh unity, including “Biz birgemiz,” as well as praise for cultural authenticity and attachment to local places. These reactions did more than acknowledge identity performances: they reinforced particular versions of the national community. For Russian-speaking and bilingual users, posts about cities, local achievements and shared public life provided ways to express civic attachment to Kazakhstan without relying solely on ethnic or linguistic purity.

Language was one of the clearest mechanisms for marking the boundary between belonging and exclusion. Some commenters responded to Russian, English or mixed-language posts with demands to speak Kazakh or criticized “shala-Kazakh” as incomplete or culturally diluted. In these exchanges, language became evidence used to classify a person as authentic, decolonial, Russified, urban, traditional or insufficiently national. The analysis also found counter-narratives: other users defended bilingual speech, translanguaging and informal slang as legitimate features of contemporary Kazakh life, challenging hierarchies that placed “pure” Kazakh above mixed forms. The coexistence of these positions shows that digital nationalism in the sampled discussions was neither uniform nor entirely exclusionary; its meaning depended on the audience, the post and the moral framing of the exchange.

The concept of “uyat,” or shame, was central to moral and gendered regulation. Commenters invoked it when evaluating clothing, public behavior, language, family honor, religious conduct and distance from traditional expectations, particularly in discussions directed toward women. The researchers coded a comment as “uyat”-based regulation only when it linked an individual’s conduct to collective moral, cultural, gendered or national expectations, distinguishing this from uses of the term for embarrassment, concern, advice, humor or irony. Posts displaying Westernized clothing or non-traditional confidence could therefore become matters of public moral judgment, with commenters asking what parents would think or whether the subject was behaving like a “Kazakh girl.” The analysis indicates how a localized communal mechanism can extend into a wider digital sphere, where individuals may be evaluated by strangers as well as family and local acquaintances.

Religious and moral influencers served as intermediaries in this process. Their posts translated broad claims about modesty, family hierarchy, femininity, religious conduct and cultural respectability into concrete standards that commenters could apply to particular people. The authors describe such influencers as ideological intermediaries who connect national or moral narratives with everyday lifestyle judgments. Their authority is not equivalent to formal state authority, but it can help establish which forms of conduct appear proper. The most punitive interactions sometimes progressed beyond correction into “digital vigilantism,” expressed through public denunciation, tagging, collective condemnation and degrading language. The corpus included “grotesque” vocabulary and dehumanizing metaphors used to place a target outside acceptable moral or national conduct. Such comments operated as an informal digital courtroom in which criticism could become a form of collective punishment.

To capture the interaction among peer monitoring, linguistic correction, public denunciation and amplified visibility, the authors introduce “networked ethnopolitical governance.” It describes decentralized regulation of national belonging through the combined action of users, influencers and digital audiences rather than through formal state institutions alone. The framework connects lateral surveillance, in which peers monitor one another, with language policing, digital vigilantism and the “weaponization of visibility.” It does not imply that user-driven enforcement operates outside the influence of official narratives about language, national unity and decolonization. Instead, it locates regulation across state discourse, influential accounts, ordinary users and the visible interaction spaces offered by Instagram. The study did not directly test algorithmic ranking, moderation systems, bot networks or coordinated state activity, so any influence from those mechanisms remains a contextual interpretation rather than a demonstrated effect.

Five semi-structured interviews broadly corroborated the social-media patterns. Participants, selected for expertise in ethnopolitics, sociolinguistics, digital communication, cultural studies and gender or moral regulation, described Kazakh-language use in digital spaces as capable of functioning as a moral and political statement rather than merely a communicative choice. They also described “uyat” as extending beyond localized communal judgment into broader digital use, allowing large and sometimes anonymous audiences to police conformity. The interviews were used to contextualize and qualify the Instagram findings, not to generate numerical estimates or constitute a separate dataset. Two researchers independently coded the multimodal material, discussed disagreements and ambiguous cases and assigned final categories by consensus, but formal intercoder reliability statistics were not calculated.

Across the selected corpus, the prevalence of hybrid performances indicates that many users combined rather than chose between tradition and modernity: national ornaments, local landscapes, bilingual captions, global fashion and urban life could coexist in the same image. Yet these performances were also exposed to evaluation, with users responding through affirmation, correction, shame or public denunciation. The findings therefore do not show that Instagram simply pluralizes identity, imposes a single cultural model or demonstrably enlarges state control. They show that, within interaction-rich public posts, national belonging was negotiated through visual presentation, linguistic choice and audience judgment. Whether a hybrid, traditional or decolonial performance was accepted remained contingent on the public response it generated. The study’s broader contribution is to reveal a site where ordinary digital interactions can make cultural, linguistic, gendered and moral boundaries of national membership visible and contestable.

Subject of Research: How public Instagram interactions perform and regulate ethnonational identity in Kazakhstan

Article Title: Performing the nation online: Instagram and networked ethnopolitical governance in Kazakhstan

Article References: Karatay, N., & Tyulebekova, D. (2026). Performing the nation online: Instagram and networked ethnopolitical governance in Kazakhstan. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1944471. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1944471

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1944471

Keywords: Instagram, Kazakhstan, digital nationalism, ethnonational identity, language policing, online shaming, uyat, hybrid identity, decolonial identity, digital ethnography, Performing, nation