As Kazakhstan’s government prepares for a constitutional referendum on Sunday, March 15, media outlets and activist circles have come under attack, with the help of international tech companies.

A Meta user by the name “Giorgio Armani S.P.A” flagged a number of Instagram posts by Murat Daniyar, a video journalist who runs the Jurttyn Balasy YouTube channel. On March 9, Instagram deleted all of Daniyar’s flagged posts, leaving the account active.

The same happened with Assem Zhapisheva, a journalist with Til Kespek Joq: on March 10 her Instagram account was “purged” after the same Meta user – hiding behind the conspicuous name of a world-famous Italian fashion designer brand – flagged her posts.

“I thought that Meta gave our authorities access to fight terrorists, not journalists,” Zhapisheva wrote on her Telegram channel.

There are other examples of seemingly coordinated attacks on media personalities. Facebook deleted all posts by Irina Petrushova, the editor of Respublika, an opposition newspaper in exile, as well as a number of posts by Bakhytzhan Toregozhina, a human rights activist. Two weeks before, hackers took over the Meta accounts of Vadim Boreiko, a journalist known for his YouTube channel Giperborei.

And Meta is not the only Silicon Valley company that has engaged in blocking, purging, or throttling web accounts and traffic. The Just Journalism YouTube account run by Lukpan Akhmedyarov was blocked a number of times in the past year after coordinated requests from accounts registered in India flagged it for “inappropriate content.” Independent media outlet Vlast.kz was subjected to various DDoS attacks, two of which halted traffic to the website for hours.

While all of these attacks had a temporary character – all of the accounts and posts are usually restored within a day or two – the frequency of these instances has gone hand in hand with the government’s effort to stifle the airing of any contrarian views toward the new constitution.

Between the end of January and the beginning of February, a special Constitutional Committee was formed to implement a number of reforms to Kazakhstan’s institutional infrastructure. By the end of the consultations, it became clear that the quickest and most clear-cut solution would have been to draft a new text and submit it to a referendum as a whole, instead of putting each amendment to a vote.

The hasty sessions of the committee, the members of which were handpicked by the president, were choreographed so that there would be the least amount of time to openly discuss the changes. The last session of the committee was not publicly broadcast and only a small number of journalists were allowed to attend from a nearby “media room.”

The government says that “hasty” is not the appropriate word to describe the process of institutional reform. According to the head of the committee, work had been going on behind the scenes for more than six months. 

Once the reform plan became a matter of public domain with the announcement of the March 15 referendum last month, however, any and all opposition voices were silenced.

On March 5, the authorities placed Orazaly Yerzhanov, an anticorruption activist, in pre-trial detention for two months. He had been arrested 10 days before and accused of “obstruction of the exercise of electoral rights,” after doing an interview for Boreiko’s YouTube channel. The two-month detention is, according to Yerzhanov’s lawyers, unlawful: the activist is accused of violations that could be punished with a maximum sentence of four years in prison and detention during pre-trial investigation only applies to charges punishable with five or more years in prison.

Media companies and journalists were fined for social media surveys about the constitutional amendments. Makpal Mukankyzy of RFE/RL and Uralskaya Nedelya were penalized for asking subscribers whether they agreed with the proposed reforms.  

The discourse online swiftly changed: social media users started using code words instead of “constitution.” Posts about the “consistency of sour cream” or “construction of a drywall” mushroomed, highlighting a workaround to the ongoing censorship.

Ahead of the referendum, advertised as a way to make everyone’s vote count, users of social media platforms have experienced the boundaries that were set to freedom of expression, both by the government and by the zealous oversight of social media companies, which have preventively blocked and stifled the accounts that were flagged as inappropriate.

The author is also an editor at Vlast.kz