Author: Lakmusz, member of HDMO
Until the elections in April, we 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 fourth weekly digest of the digital trends shaping the campaign period.
Where AI videos meet Facebook ads: circumventing Meta’s ban continues
The use of AI-generated videos in the election campaign seems to be growing in popularity: last week, we mentioned that Political Capital had found a suspicious Facebook page distributing AI-generated videos supporting one of the Democratic Coalition’s candidates and discrediting the other one from the Tisza Party. Of course, these videos were advertised on Facebook despite Meta’s ban, and even though most of the ads have been removed, at the time of writing our article, we still found some active ads with the same videos, reaching tens of thousands of people. We tried to find out who is behind this obscure Facebook page. The Democratic Coalition candidate confirmed that he had nothing to do with the AI-generated contents.
The ads of the page targeted the exact same 5 cities as the fearmongering war videos we already reported about. These cities are in the electoral district of the current Minister of Justice, Bence Tuzson. That district has proven to be very active in the field of AI-generated content: Political Capital found another mysterious Facebook page that ran several ads promoting an AI video supporting a candidate from the opposition MKKP (Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party).
This means that several Facebook pages have run ads of AI videos in the same electoral district. Each of them supports different candidates, but what they have in common is that they all circumvent Meta’s ban.
As we already noted, Ellenszél, an online website closely associated with the Democratic Coalition, had also shared AI videos. The videos are part of the party’s campaign against the voting rights of Hungarian dual citizens living outside Hungary. The Democratic Coalition exaggerates in its communication the increase in the voter registry for citizens living outside Hungary.
Interestingly, we found that the Democratic Coalition opposes AI-generated political content and wants to regulate the use of AI during the campaign period to prevent voter manipulation. So, the question is: will they do something about the AI videos that aim to help their campaign? We’ll see.
Super forecasters now expect Fidesz to lose
Last November, The Economist published a prediction of the so-called super forecasters of a research company Good Judgement about the Hungarian election. Back then, the Hungarian government spokesperson misinterpreted the forecast, because the 55:43 result did not mean that the super forecasters predicted that Fidesz would win the election by that margin, but that according to the average of the predictions at the time, there was a 55 percent chance that Fidesz would win some kind of majority.
We have now looked at the updated predictions and found that, according to the latest data,
the super forecasters see a 56 percent chance that Fidesz will not win a majority in the April elections.
According to a social media analysis, Fidesz is not doing well either: although Viktor Orbán posts the most on Facebook, Péter Magyar is the one receiving the most reactions, twice as many as Orbán.
The central themes of the campaign: the economy and environmental pollution
In an interview, Viktor Orbán claimed that the 11 percent increase in the minimum wage in Hungary was a unique achievement. We have bad news for the prime minister: we can point to three European countries where the minimum wage increase was bigger than in Hungary. In addition, we compared the minimum wages of European countries and found that Hungary’s is still quite low.
The battery manufacturing industry and the environmental pollution associated with manufacturing became a central topic in the election campaign following an investigative article by Telex in early February. The pro-government media tried to refute the story with reports stating that there is no pollution around the Samsung factory. We looked at the reports and, with the help of two experts, explained why the conclusions of the pro-government articles are not true and what conclusions can be drawn from the reports.
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