A mass protest by young people was the most colorful, but not the first manifestation of the growing might of social media in Hungary’s hidebound political culture.
The role of the stars of Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms in politics is evolving. This is especially true of Hungary, where the nationalist ruling party has deep influence over the print and broadcast media but only a small, but growing, presence online.
The online world in Hungary is “more balanced” because there are more independent sources of information, unlike the managed, pro-government messages seen on television and heard on the radio, according to Balint Mikola, a postdoctoral researcher at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest, and former head of communications at Transparency International Hungary.
One result is that content creators have free reign to produce content of all kinds, including politics.
“That works best with Generation Z and probably even younger audiences,” said Mikola, 34, whose research looks at illiberalism in Europe as well as political communication, especially in how influencers shape public opinion.
Politics Lite
Freedom House ranked Hungary as “partly free” in both the “global freedom” and “internet freedom” categories in its 2024 Freedom in the World report – the only EU nation slapped with that label. The U.S. think tank stated that although the Hungarian constitution protects freedom of the press, pro-government media dominate the industry, partly as a result of advertising and sponsorship that favor these outlets, leaving independent outlets in poor financial positions. The report also notes that pro-government media are often used to bash the ruling Fidesz party’s political opponents.
One large government-friendly media company is Mediaworks, owned by Hungarian company Opus Global, which is known to be positively aligned with Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Mediaworks claims 5 million monthly visitors to its stable of some 80 national and local news outlets and 6.8 million social media followers.
Fidesz handily won the most recent national elections two years ago, enabling Orban to remain in office for a fourth consecutive term. Despite the ruling party’s sway over the classical political landscape, Mikola said the government has been “struggling to maintain its dominance” online.
Mikola said the political content that social media influencers post is not uniform, but usually “very sarcastic” or making fun of the government.
When a big crowd gathered in Budapest in February at a protest against the Orban government, YouTuber Edina Pottyondy was among the speakers. A video she posted in March, “The Empire Strikes Back: Facts Have No Mercy; Revenge of the opposition: Not surprising, not amusing” garnered more than 650,000 views of her satirical take on current political events, riffing on the titles of Star Wars movies.
“It’s actually not in their [influencers’] financial interests to do a lot of very heavy political content,” Mikola said. “However, most of these people belong to Generation Z, which is, in general, not very supportive of the government.”
Fortunately for social media influencers, half of Hungarian young people spend from one to five hours daily on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, according to a 2021 Friedrich Ebert Stiftung study.
When Influencer Turns Activist
That study also found that the younger generation lags well behind its Central European peers in terms of political participation. So it was “unprecedented” when tens of thousands of young people showed up at the February protest, according to Mikola.
Digital content creators organized the demonstration, including Instagram lifestyle influencer Judit Banyai and YouTubers Marton Gulyas and Zsolt Osvath, whose channels Partizan and ZSHOW Time have hundreds of thousands of followers. The protest originated amid the furor around conservative President Katalin Novak’s pardon of a man who was involved in covering up a sexual abuse case at a children’s home. Novak had submitted her resignation days earlier, but the event went ahead, transformed into a mass protest against Orban’s government.
Eszter Imre-Kando, a freelance journalist from Hungary, said the government’s primary expression of power on social media is to imitate its anti-government counterparts, such as Partizan, a professional-quality show that advocates for political change.
While Fidesz has not taken control of social media as it has with radio and television, “they somehow influence social media as they can, such as with money and more influencers,” Imre-Kando said. “As they figure out younger people, they build actors with their own messages, so they appear as their own influencers, but they do not collect followers in an organic way.” She said she believes most of them are paid followers.
Hungarian think tank Political Capital identified more than 500 fake Facebook profiles in 2023, spreading “pro-government propaganda” that shared articles primarily from government-influenced outlets. Although the individuals behind the profiles are unknown, the think tank believes they were coordinated from within Hungary.
In these posts, “[T]here is often an explicit focus on amplifying government narratives in community groups and spreading disinformation and defamatory content discrediting opposition parties and politicians,” Political Capital’s Peter Kreko, Csaba Molnar, and Rachel Suranyi commented for Euronews.
While the ruling party has strong followings in rural, less well-off communities and among the elderly, Fidesz has taken to combating its younger and more online-savvy critics with disinformation, following well-worn techniques used against the political opposition.
“Their typical reaction, if these [the influencers] were party politicians, they would just launch really aggressive negative campaigns against them,” Mikola said.
For example, Osvath was the subject of pro-government media stories accusing him of being a pedophile after the tabloid BORS released a strategically edited 2020 YouTube video in which he appeared to admit to sending pornographic material to a minor. Osvath then told the news outlet Telex he had been tricked into “sexting” with a boy aged under 18.
Similar allegations hit another protest organizer, popular musician Azariah, when the conservative, pro-government Center for Fundamental Rights hinted that the singer had relations with underage girls at his concerts.
How to Win Voters and Influence People
Sixty percent of young Hungarians aged 16 to 29 are “dissatisfied” with the country’s politics, and 43 percent said they do not have a party preference, according to a 2023 study by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Young people are the segment of society least interested in politics, with only 55 to 60 percent of under-25s expressing their willingness to vote, research by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation concluded ahead of the 2022 elections.
Mikola noted that the protest organizers sought to make it an “explicitly nonpartisan” event by avoiding signs with party logos or messages, as well as not inviting party politicians.
“There’s this generation of young content creators, who clearly have political demands and perhaps even political ambitions, but they are nonpartisan,” Mikola said.
Social media offer the most direct way of reaching young potential voters – a fact of modern politics that Fidesz’s friends have tried to turn to their advantage. The ruling party and others have been able to “circumvent” campaign financing rules by outsourcing campaign activities to other actors, such as NGOs that are not officially affiliated with politics, Mikola said.
Individual candidates in general election campaigns have a 5-million forint budget ($13,600). While candidates are limited to this amount of money, which has to be carefully documented, campaign rules fail to address costs allocated to social media, Hungary Today reported in 2022. In his research paper on the role of social media influencers in amplifying pro-government narratives,Mikola wrote that some candidates spent more than 5 million forints on Facebook alone.
That reflects the result of pro-government organizations turning to social media influencers as a political strategy.
Founded in 2019, Megafon, a small company (but allegedly well-funded) with no official ties to the government, pooled together a group of social media influencers to post online content that has paralleled the government’s messages.
Megafon’s owner Istvan Kovacs doubles as strategic director at the Center for Fundamental Rights, which, as mentioned above, is known for its pro-government views.
Saying that it aimed to create a new conservative voice, Megafon did not “explicitly” state its allegiance to Fidesz, Mikola said, but there was a “clear ideological agenda.” Megafon’s influencer team currently numbers 10 to 15 people, all well-known from other pro-government platforms, he said, and the influencers have a “generous” budget because the company is not bound by campaign regulations.
“Their narrative was that if you’re conservative young people who are fed up with the liberal dominance on social media, you should join us, and we will show you how to be good patriots on social media.”
Telex, one of the few media outlets to openly criticize the government, reported in 2022 that Megafon was indirectly funded by the Hungarian Cabinet Office.
Megafon’s messages sometimes try to grab audiences with jokes and humor.
“It’s not very sophisticated and usually quite childish, but definitely more informal than what serious politicians are supposed to say,” Mikola said.
Journalist Imre-Kando said Megafon is behind the country’s “most well-known” government-friendly influencers, citing Meta data that Megafon had paid for over 400 political ads on 12 Facebook pages since January.
The Next Big Political Thing
Hungary is, of course, not the only country where politicians are eyeing the swelling power of social media influencers.
Though traditional media platforms remain the main source of political information, influencers play a role in forming the opinions of young people, who see influencers as trusted sources of information, according to a 2023 study published in the open access journal Media and Communication. The paper further states that social media users tend to follow influencers if their opinions align, or if they see a striking piece of content that persuades them.
“This shift is strongly influenced by habits of the youngest generations, who have grown up with social media and nowadays often pay more attention to influencers or celebrities than they do to journalists, even when it comes to news,” the Reuters Institute writes in its most recent Digital News Report.
U.S. President Joe Biden hosted a group of over 70 influencers at the White House before his recent State of the Union address, hoping to reach a digital audience of 100 million who may not have turned on their televisions for his speech.
Biden previously enlisted social media stars to promote COVID-19 vaccines, and again to share the administration’s views after Russia launched all-out war against Ukraine.
While some nations’ leaders are using influencers to reach younger audiences, some influencers are harnessing social media as a tool for their own political activism.
Mikola mentioned the “Rezo effect,” named after the German YouTuber whose videos accused the political establishment of being corrupt and encouraged people to vote for smaller and new parties.
“I think it’s happening all over the place,” Mikola said. “I think the great differences are to what extent it’s institutionalized, to what extent influencers are really hired by the political parties themselves or just engage in politics voluntarily.”
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Lydie Lake is a journalism and political science student at George Washington University. She is an editorial intern at Transitions during her study abroad program in Prague.
