This text was published by FACT, one of fifteen EDMO Hubs.
The elections in Hungary unfold amid profound tensions, including targeted attacks on civil society watchdogs and journalists, otherwise a modus operandi for the incumbent regime. Correspondingly, the information space is suffused with coordinated narratives/scripts amplified at a scale and regularity that well exceeds organic political enthusiasm. The level of inauthentic behaviour indicative of automation aims to suffocate the debate, flooding public comment spaces not to persuade, but to displace. Where genuine political discourse might otherwise surface, the signal is evidently drowned by the sheer volume: identical strings, copied and pasted on instruction, repeated hundreds and thousands of times within the span of a single broadcast. An analysis of comment activity across 19 TikTok live sessions hosted by Prime Minister Viktor Orban between the 18th and 29th of March 2026 (almost two weeks before the ballot day) renders this dynamic in precise, quantifiable terms. irst and foremost, the scale and systematicity of these operations carries direct implications for the Digital Services Act’s electoral integrity framework. Under Articles 34(1)(c) and 35(1)(c), TikTok (as a designated Very Large Online Platform, VLOP) bears an explicit obligation to assess and mitigate systemic risks to civic discourse, obligations that acquire substantive weight during electoral cycles. The evidence presented here suggests those obligations went unmet: a coordinated inauthentic campaign of this magnitude, operating across multiple sessions in the span of slightly over a week, should have triggered automated detection and timely intervention well before researchers and watchdogs were able to document it, albeit reactively.
Attila Biro & Daniel Timofte (Context Romania) Andra-Lucia Martinescu & Marius Dima (Qriton Technologies)
Data collection & analysis: AI Factory Context.ro & Qriton Advanced CIB Detection Module Formats: csv, jsonl
Observation window: 18-29 March 2026 Platform: TikTok (PM Viktor Orban live sessions) Sessions analysed: 19 Total records (comments) captured: 257,667 Unique actors/users identified: 12,558