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By Alice Lee
From claims that Ukrainians tried to kill the incumbent Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to the opposition’s supposed plan to draft Hungarians to fight for Ukraine, Hungarian social media is awash with AI-generated slop and often Russia-produced video content. It’s tempting to dismiss these memes and narratives — which can seem silly or far-fetched and have emerged in the final months of a heated election campaign — as a distraction from the main event.
However, they fulfill a more serious purpose that may not be obvious: seeding or amplifying Orban’s campaign messaging and playing on Hungarian fears via false claims and algorithm-friendly propaganda.
Hungarians go to the polls on Sunday in crucial parliamentary elections, as Orbán, a far-right Eurosceptic with ties to the Kremlin, faces fierce competition from the more EU-oriented center-right opposition candidate, Péter Magyar. Sunday’s vote is expected to decide how much influence Russia maintains within the European Union, as Orbán has repeatedly vetoed EU aid to Ukraine. Orbán’s defeat would be a blow to Russia, which, as NewsGuard...
Melania Trump on Thursday (April 9) issued an unexpected public statement denying any connection to Jeffrey Epstein, pushing back against what she described as long-running false claims circulatin...