Abstract
This article examines social media consumption and civic engagement of youth in Kazakhstan. Based on original surveys, in-depth interviews with leaders of civil society organizations and correlation analysis, this article compares the social media consumption and civic engagement of Kazakh-speaking and Russian-speaking youth in Kazakhstan, irrespective of ethnicity. Kazakhstan is a multiethnic community, though only these two languages are spoken actively. The article traces the dynamics of youth social media consumption and civic engagement by comparing data from the 2019 and 2023 original surveys. Moreover, the paper conducts a correlation analysis of the original survey data to examine whether there is an association between youth social media consumption and offline civic engagement. The article suggests that youth civic engagement has not been growing significantly since 2019. It indicates that social media plays a secondary role in youth civic engagement. The article shows that youth civic engagement differs by language cohort, regardless of ethnicity, although social media consumption is rather similar across the two language groups (Kazakh-speaking and Russian-speaking).