LABScon23 Replay | Black Magic – Influence Operations At-Scale in Hungary | Martin Wendiggensen

Influence operations are often thought of as clandestine meddling in other countries’ affairs, but what if, right in front of our eyes, a NATO ally and EU Member State had developed a system to consistently peddle Russian talking points at a large scale within its own borders and beyond?

Hungary’s media ecosystem is under the control of oligarchs loyal to the state and friendly to Russia. The vast majority of these outlets were gifted, free of charge, to a holding controlled by the prime minister’s close confidants.

To prove the existence of an at-scale and continuous influence operation, Martin Wendiggensen and his collaborators collected all coverage of Ukraine from major news outlets and analyzed their dataset with Semi-Supervised Machine Learning. The picture that emerged was stark: an ensemble of striking narratives aligned with Russian interests in denigrating Ukraine and the West.

Matching their findings with an archive of Russian media, they showed how vast sections of Hungarian media actively pick up Russian narratives and amplify them. This dark alignment of narratives runs deeper than words, leading the investigation to the staged firebombing of a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine, and an obscure Cold War-era “spy bank” actively circumventing sanctions on Russia.

As electorates across the US and Europe go to the polls in 2024, this must-see presentation on large-scale state influence operations could hardly be more timely or relevant.