Author: Lakmusz, member of HDMO
Until the elections in April, Lakmusz will closely monitor social media and traditional media, with a particular focus on disinformation related to the elections and false or misleading content spread by the candidates.
This is our second weekly digest of the digital trends shaping the campaign period.
AI-generated fearmongering about war
At the end of December, an obscure Facebook page called Not our war was created. This page only features AI-generated videos, which aim to instill fear about the war and convey the message that “War takes everything away, don’t risk it!” in reference to the main message of the governing party Fidesz and the “right choice” on election day. Political Capital has been monitoring this page and its paid political ads on Facebook.
They found that since February, these ads have exclusively targeted 5 cities in the electoral district of the current Minister of Justice, Bence Tuzson, who is running for re-election (Political Capital previously found that the politician likes to circumvent Meta’s ban on political ads with seemingly apolitical videos). Our article also analysed the ads run by the Not our war page, and found that 132 ads had been posted and only 18 of them had been taken down, not because of their political nature, but because they were classified as aggressive visual depictions.
Who is behind this page? We don’t know for sure, but the ties to Fidesz is obvious: Fidelitas, the youth organization of the ruling party, is campaigning with the same “Not our war” slogan, and has launched a petition against the alleged compulsory conscription that would come into effect if the Tisza Party won the election, according to Fidelitas. It’s a popular topic within the ruling party that the opposition party wants to reintroduce compulsory military service. We previously investigated this claim and found out that the “evidence” on which the fake news was based was a manipulated video distributed by Fidelitas.
Political Capital also found that Ellenszél, an online website closely associated with the socialist opposition party, Democratic Coalition, had also started using AI to create videos. The videos are part of the party’s campaign against the voting rights of Hungarian dual citizens living outside Hungary. In the AI-generated videos, people talk about how they will use their voting rights to support Viktor Orbán and Fidesz. As noted in our previous weekly digest, the Democratic Coalition exaggerates in its communication the increase in the voter registry for citizens living outside Hungary.
Speeches with misleading information from both sides
Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar both gave long speeches last weekend to assess the past year and plan the coming year. Both shared some inaccurate information. Orbán boasted that thanks to Fidesz’s family policy, 200,000 more Hungarian children were born, which we found highly misleading. The prime minister also claimed that one million new jobs had been created, but this figure is inaccurate: it’s true that the employment rate has increased over the past decade and a half, but this doesn’t mean that one million new jobs have been established.
Péter Magyar alleged that it’s actually the ruling party’s politicians who want to reintroduce compulsory military service. Although some Fidesz politicians have expressed their views on conscription in the past, there has been no initiative to reinstate it in Hungary. Moreover, Magyar likely referred to a quote by Viktor Orbán, that the prime minister said 25 years ago, before military conscription was abolished in Hungary.
Manipulation at its best
Manipulating speeches to support the ruling party’s messages also occurred during the last week. The Hungarian government shared a video on its official Facebook page in which Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó accused NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte of contradicting NATO’s decision that the bloc must stay out of the war between Ukraine and Russia. We found out that Rutte had indeed said the words Szijjártó was referring to, but they had been taken out of context, and the order of the sentences had been changed, giving the speech a completely different meaning.
The same tactic was used to discredit István Kapitány, a politician from the Tisza Party: his statement was cut in half, omitting an important part of his message. His original message was that if they won the election, he wanted to create a leadership culture in which they would communicate their goals and achieve them. The manipulated sentence only said that he would only communicate Tisza’s goals after winning the election. Not quite the same thing, right?
Who let the ducks out?
Péter Magyar claimed that Filipino guest workers were kept in such poor conditions in Hungary that they were starving, so they ate the ducks and goldfish from the zoo. He later corrected himself, saying that the animals did not disappear from the zoo, but from the lake in the City Park, which is in front of the zoo. We asked the maintainers of the lake, and it turned out that they hadn’t noticed any animal disappearing from the lake; in fact, they did not install goldfish in that lake at all. There have been similar allegations against Filipino workers in the past, which have proven to be false. The police warned at that time that such accusations could promote prejudice and hatred against ethnic groups.
That’s all for today, see you next Friday. Stay tuned, share this article, and tell us what you think!
Cover Photo: Annamari Dezső/Lakmusz