Abstract:
This study examines state-sponsored propaganda campaigns orchestrated by India and Pakistan on X (formerly Twitter) investigating two significant regional crises in parallel: the aftermath of the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's special status and the Taliban's recapture of Kabul. The research analyzes official accounts of key Indian and Pakistani officials on X (formerly Twitter) to identify key propaganda strategies, utilizing two datasets comprising 34,055 English-language posts collected between August 15, 2021, and January 14, 2023. A robust hybrid methodological approach combines supervised computational content analysis—measuring the prevalence of techniques from existing literature—with unsupervised topic modeling to discover emergent themes. The study reveals two novel propaganda strategies: urgency and blaming. Findings reveals that both states dynamically adapt their messaging to geopolitical developments. The substantial engagement (reposts) generated by certain techniques, particularly India's people-centric approach, provides a valuable measure of their reach and resonance on the platform. Pakistani propaganda adopts an authoritative tone and elite driven narratives aimed at establishing credibility for official perspectives. While Pakistan emphasizes trust-building through authoritative claims, India officials adopted mass-oriented strategies, emphasizing populist appeals disseminated primarily through political and defense institutions. Temporal analysis indicates both countries effectively adapt their propaganda tactics in response to regional developments, demonstrating responsiveness to public sentiment, geopolitical contexts, and optimal timing. Study also explores the transferability of techniques across distinct contexts, while acknowledging that its scope invites future research into deeper qualitative analysis of audience reception to further refine understanding of persuasive effectiveness. Both countries employ contradictory themes wherein humanitarian concerns, security narratives, domestic political agendas, and geopolitical considerations interact in complex configurations to structure their propaganda campaigns while simultaneously exploiting regional geopolitical vulnerabilities
