Huge Media Manipulation Scandal Rocks Hungary, Implicating Péter Magyar’s Camp

Gábor Holló, the billionaire owner of the news aggregator „Hírkereső”, intentionally suppressed news from right-wing portals and paid for opinion polls to help the Tisza Party win, according to an interview he gave to HVG.hu in which he spoke about how he supported Péter Magyar’s party during the campaign.

Holló said that he supported the Tisza Party’s campaign with a total of slightly more than 50 million forints (appr. € 142k), „but primarily I did not give money; for example, I paid for opinion polls”. He also stated that he opened a credit line worth several hundred million forints for Tisza, saying, „if necessary, I can give them a lot of money, just let there be change”. In the end, they did not use this credit line because they did not need it.

Later, He described how he altered the operation of the online news distribution system:

Holló thus admitted that he had intentionally pushed certain news items down in the rankings on his aggregation sites in order to reduce their impact.

Then, as he put it, he realized that simply pushing content that he regarded as propaganda downward was not enough. „Because the algorithms will highlight articles anyway based on the popularity of a website. In other words, within a media outlet (call it Fictional Propaganda Site) it is not enough to downgrade the smear articles based on their content; you also have to boost other materials. For example, a sports article, a science article, or celebrity news published there. Then the editor of Fictional Site sees traffic coming in, and it will perform well on Facebook too. (...) Later I even rewrote the algorithm accordingly.”

It is important to note that there was no clear definition of what constituted propaganda, nor were any guiding principles publicly established. As a result, there is a possibility that Holló made these decisions entirely on his own – as a secret, influential supporter of a political party, who apparently kept his political preferences and intentions hidden from both his readers and his business partners.

„How I distribute the volume to whom is our responsibility. The overwhelming majority of news-reading traffic comes from the rankings, so regulating the algorithm that compiles those rankings is exclusively our right.

That is why I could not reduce so called propaganda materials to zero overnight. I reduced their weight by half a percent per week in small steps, while simultaneously boosting the news of independent media. I did this for roughly 200 weeks, since 2022.”

In the interview, Holló also said that from June 2024 he supported Tisza as a private individual through the „regime-change card”, but initially he did not want to do more. And I started financing opinion polls so that others could realistically see from the numbers. He added that he even provided news-reading traffic to Kontroll through his media outlets free of charge. „I started ordering more and larger polls and also supporting the Tisza-aligned Kontroll.” (The Kontroll.hu is headed by the current Hungarian prime minister's brother.)

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