• Priority Area Multidisciplinary Investigations on Disinformation in Europe
• Year 2023, 2024
• Country Hungary
• Project Status Ongoing

Our project aims to uncover key, previously unknown dynamics of the funding of disinformation on the supplier side and also look at how much money Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) make by amplifying false and misleading narratives during the campaign.

Our project will monitor and analyze promoted content before and during the 2024 European election campaign in Hungary, fact-check sponsored disinformation, uncover the financiers and the sources of their funding, and provide policy recommendations for stakeholders to reduce the spread of harmful content online.

With our project, we want to enable the general public to better understand how content is promoted on VLOPs, and draw attention to the resource disparity among political actors and the results of this disparity in terms of outreach and impact of political messaging.

Besides the electorate in general, experts, policymakers, journalists and other stakeholders will benefit from the regular spending analyses, the representative survey results mapping the impact of disinformation on VLOPs, and the policy recommendations to reduce the spread of harmful content.

The results can also be used as indicators of compliance with the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation. Moreover, we will develop the methodology, protocols and recommendations with the hope that they can be used as a blueprint in other countries.

The consortium consists of the following organisations, all based in Hungary:

• Political Capital, an independent policy research, analysis and consulting institute with a special focus on Russian influence and disinformation;
• Lakmusz, Hungary’s only fact-checking organisation with almost half a million readers, and
• Mertek Media Monitor, a think tank whose mission is to strengthen media freedom by assessing and influencing media policies, improving journalists’ sense of responsibility and professionalism.