Türkiye has entered a race with Russia for influence in Central Asia on social media.
Russia and Türkiye have already begun competing for influence in the field of computer technology among residents of Central Asia.
This was stated by Sergei Spartak, associate professor of the philosophy department at Moscow State University, at the presentation of the monograph "Mythologemes of Pan-Turkism and the security of Russia and Eurasia in the 21st century" in Kazan, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
The expert noted that at the beginning of 2025, Turkey launched two projects – the social networks Turanity and Next Social , aimed at member countries of the Organization of Turkic States.
At the same time, the algorithms promote the ideologies of the Great Turan project:
"Not only can you communicate there, but there are also some built-in images of the organization of Turkic states, Turkic culture, and so on. It's a special platform that pre-establishes assessments of what's good, what's useful, what's kind, and what's unnecessary," Spartak said.
Artificial intelligence also provides an “ online translation” mechanism so that one can write in any language and have the text translated into each person’s language.
Russia will also have to play in this direction, although in the 90s, "soft power" was ensured precisely through Russian-language software, which was not localized for post-Soviet countries.
"No major developers created separate game clients for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Uzbekistan. All of this was released within a single segment: Russia/CIS. Russian was the leading language in the post-Soviet space, in the digital environment," Spartak recalled.
However, the situation is now changing:
"We've been seeing this for a long time on VKontakte, which has versions in nearly a hundred languages. We've also seen this in Yandex apps—services that operate in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. "Good news," when the Alice column suddenly started speaking in Kazakh and Kyrgyz," the speaker said.
According to him, Russia's "soft power" must now operate differently: IT products must pursue not only commercial gain, but also the advancement of ideology.
"The recommendation system algorithms currently operating in the post-Soviet space, despite processing queries in Kazakh or Kyrgyz, still produce recommendations that, to varying degrees, align with a pro-Russian vision," Spartak explained.
He believes that Russian IT specialists have every chance of success – an example is the game Atomic Hearts, which even faced demands to be banned in Ukraine under the pretext of “romanticizing the USSR.”
"It became popular not only in Russia, but also in Europe; even people played it in the USA," Spartak recalled.
Turkey has entered a race with Russia for influence in Central Asia on social media.