2026/03/15 by Rakhmanali Begaliyevich Bekmirzayev · 1 voice
Psychology · #Cultural Differences and Values #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion
paper · doi:10.1080/03068374.2026.2642232
openalex publication_date 2026/03/15 · openalex created_date 2026/04/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/13
This article examines how different social media platforms shape interethnic relations in the Fergana Valley in Central Asia through their distinct technological features – what scholars call ‘platform affordances.’ Based on a 36-month digital ethnography analysing 15,683 posts from 1,247 users across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram, this study reveals that platform architecture significantly influences ethnic interaction patterns. Instagram’s visual focus creates ‘cultural democracy’ with 41.2% positive cross-ethnic engagement, while Facebook’s political architecture generates 32.4% conflict-related discourse. TikTok’s algorithmic content discovery enables ‘accidental cultural contact’ across ethnic boundaries, whereas Telegram’s channel-based structure produces the strongest ethnic echo chambers, with only 12.3% of users subscribing to content from other ethnic groups. Interview data from 47 participants combined with network analysis demonstrates that platform-specific features create systematically different possibilities for ethnic expression and intergroup contact. These findings challenge the assumption that ‘social media’ affects ethnic relations uniformly and provide evidence-based insights for platform design and digital policy in multicultural societies. The research contributes Digital Ethnic Contact Theory (DECT), a framework explaining how algorithmic mediation fundamentally transforms conditions for interethnic contact in post-conflict contexts.