Analyzing India-Pakistan digital propaganda strategies on the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan

In this article, we empirically examined the prevalence of digital propaganda strategies employed by selected officials from India and Pakistan regarding the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. To achieve this, we utilized both computerized content analysis and topic modelling. While we assessed the prevalence of classical propaganda strategies, we also introduced two new strategies critical to modern digital statecraft: urgency and blaming. These were integrated into our framework to capture how states manufacture crisis conditions to justify extraordinary measures and the systematic scapegoating of external actors to deflect criticism and avoid accountability. The findings indicate that Pakistani propaganda was more authority-oriented, whereas Indian propaganda was more people-oriented. Furthermore, we discovered that propaganda strategies addressing the general populace garnered more online attention compared to other strategies. The topic modelling approach revealed that the official discourse from Pakistan was generally cautiously optimistic about the new government in Afghanistan in the selected time period of the study, in contrast to Indian discourse raised alarms and called for vigilance against the Taliban.