The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Kata Horváth, whose focus is on political influencer videos in the 2024 Hungarian elections. Hungary has now backslid into authoritarianism, and its mainstream media system have been captured by political interests aligned with the Fidesz party; the social media environment is also severely affected by hostile narratives from disinformation influencers, however.
Hostile narratives are designed to create an enemy figure that provides a target for social frustrations, reinforce polarisation, and distract from real issues. Social media advertising is also dominated by the Fidesz party, in part through the Megafon influencer centre that supports ‘politically motivated’, Fidesz-aligned youth to become influencers by offering branding and media training as well as spending public money on social media advertising.
Megafon creates memes and videos, coordinating content by influencers to use the same image and video inputs as well as rhetoric; only the personalities and target audiences of these influencers differ. This is therefore a state-driven and state-funded, highly organised disinformation distribution centre; its hostile narratives attack individuals and groups like George Soros, Ursula von der Leyen, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, LGBTIQ+ communities, migrants and refugees, ‘globalists’, Ukraine, and the European Union.
The group remains almost entirely unknown to the Hungarian public, though; to date it has managed to avoid any public scrutiny. This model is likely to be replicated all over the world, and understanding and stopping it is therefore critical not only for Hungary itself.
