Abstract:
Public awareness and communication with civil society in times of crisis, especially
during the currently ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has become of great importance to many
governments, the media, the public and other crucial government stakeholders. Problems of
disinformation along with the low levels of social trust towards state institutions have challenged
many nation-state governments and brought them also at the same new opportunities and ways
to solve their domestic problems. In this article, these particularly two issues are addressed by
analyzing the decision-making process of states and in the context of top-down and bottom-up
approaches. As a case study, official COVID-19 statistics and official factchecking web portals
of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Republic of Russia were evaluated and considered. Social
projects such as those of BizBirgemiz and MyVmeste were also taken analyzed and included
in our comparative analysis in this paper. This article is divided into four parts. The first part
concerns the introduction section. The second section introduces, describes and studies the
case studies this paper will look at. In the third section, the discussion and analysis of the case
studies follow. Last but not the least, the fourth section concludes our analysis with additional
policy recommendations provided. Our analysis has shown that in almost all cases the topdown approach dominates for both countries of Russia and Kazakhstan, except for the so-called
initiated social project MyVmeste, which followed rather a bottom-up-led path. Despite that, the
paper shows us how crisis situations with the COVID-19 pandemic have become both catalysts
for solving specific societal problems, such as disinformation issue and a source for detecting
insufficient policy interventions, particularly in the cyber realm.
