A Comparative Study of the Effectiveness of Pandemic Information Dissemination between Self-Media and Traditional Media in China and Kazakhstan

In the post-truth era, emotions and positions gradually overtake objective facts and become the dominant factors in public perception. Taking China and Kazakhstan as case studies, this study compares and analyzes the differences in the information dissemination effects of self media and traditional media during the COVID-19 in the two countries through questionnaires. Through quantitative content analysis and audience surveys, it is found that China’s self-media rapidly spread information about the epidemic by virtue of immediacy and interactivity, but some of the content exacerbated rumor dissemination due to excessive emotionality; traditional media, although subject to policy regulation and control, showed higher consistency, but dominated in terms of public trust. In Kazakhstan, due to the relative concentration of traditional media resources, the authority of traditional media was still dominant in the early stage of the epidemic, but the fragmentation and contradiction of information in the self-media due to lax regulation weakened the public’s recognition of official information. The study further reveals that differences in audience trust in media between the two countries are influenced by political culture, media ecology, and information governance model: the Chinese public is more institutionally dependent on traditional media, while the young population in Kazakhstan prefers to obtain pluralistic information through cross-border self-media. This study provides new perspectives for comparing the mechanisms of post-truth communication in transnational contexts and suggests ways to optimize information governance strategies in public health emergencies.