Until the elections in April, Lakmusz will publish weekly summaries of the latest disinformation trends and other digital developments shaping the campaign period.
In less than 60 days, parliamentary elections will be held in Hungary. Officially, the campaign will begin in a week, but campaigning has been going on for a long time, especially in the digital space. At Lakmusz, we are paying close attention to social media and traditional online media during this period, with a particular focus on false information or misleading content spread by the parties, as well as disinformation related to the elections.
In the spotlight – Political ads appear despite Meta’s ban
Although Meta stopped political advertising in the EU on October 6 last year, this doesn’t prevent the ruling party, Fidesz, from running political ads. An analysis by Political Capital found that 14 of the 106 Fidesz candidates placed a total of 181 ads in January. Of these, Meta classified only 19 as political, while the other 162 passed through the platform’s filters without any problems.
This is not the first time that pro-government actors have circumvented Meta’s rules: the National Resistance Movement (NEM) constantly places political ads on the platform, with their videos generally aimed at discrediting Péter Magyar, the main opposition leader. One recent video, which ran as a political ad during Christmas season, received 17 million views.
On February 4, NEM placed another ad: this time on an AI-generated video depicting a fictional phone call between Ursula von der Leyen and Péter Magyar, in which von der Leyen instructs Magyar to send money to Ukraine immediately after the elections. The video was widely shared, even by Viktor Orbán, who wrote on his Facebook page:
“This is only the work of AI, but it could become reality after a bad decision on April 12!”
Nóra Király, another Fidesz candidate appeared in several videos advertised on TikTok by an NGO, found Political Capital while monitoring TikTok’s supposedly politics-free ad library. What’s the problem with this? First, TikTok has banned political ads since 2019, and second, the NGO was founded by Nóra Király herself.
Misleading data on postal votes and an error in the Tisza Party’s program
Klára Dobrev, leader of the opposition Democratic Coalition (DK) party, claimed that
“twice as many dual citizens living abroad have registered to vote as voted in the last election”.
We found this to be misleading: there are only slightly more registered voters in the database than before the 2022 elections, and most of them did not register recently, because registration in the database is valid for 10 years.
We also spotted a mistake in the Tisza Party’s program, where they claimed that inflation in Hungary has been truly bad over the past 16 years (which is true), and if we look at basic commodities, it’s even more dramatic. They cited the price of sour cream as an example, which, according to them, has risen fifteenfold since 2010. The Hungarian Central Statistical Office has an explanation for this, which the party seems to have ignored: the data for 2010 and 2024 are not comparable because they do not refer to the same quantities or packaging.
The ruling party’s anti-Ukrainian narrative
Viktor Orbán presented an article by POLITICO as a declaration of war and dubbed it the Zelensky Plan. According to the Hungarian prime minister, Brussels and Kyiv want to interfere in the Hungarian elections: they want to remove him and his national government and replace them with Péter Magyar, who will do everything Brussels and Kyiv ask for. In reality, the so-called plan is only an article that weighed five possible steps that could help Ukraine join the EU in 2027, and never mentioned that anyone wants to topple Orbán.
Pro-government Hungarian outlets and Fidesz politicians spread the rumour that the Ukrainian media was talking about the assassination of Viktor Orbán. We found out that this claim cites one single Facebook post by a Ukrainian site. We spoke to the admin of the Facebook page in question, who told Lakmusz that they were not talking about the possible assassination of Viktor Orbán, but about what would happen if the Hungarian prime minister, who calls Ukraine an enemy, launched an attack on the neighbouring country.
That’s a wrap, see you next Friday. Stay tuned, share this article, and let us know what you think!
Cover Photo: Annamari Dezső/Lakmusz