'Dollar' media to influence Hungarian voters with fake prescription and Covid vaccination sites and 4bn forints - video

CovidVaccination.info, Recipes.today, Joke Magazine... These are the English names of the online platforms used by Hungary's opposition "dollar" media to try and influence the 2022 parliamentary elections with over HUF 4bn that was pumped into the left wing's campaign from abroad. The sites - which are of course no longer operational - used political content to persuade voters not to vote for the governing parties.

Karácsony Gergely, Bajnai Gordon, Jávor Benedek. Fotó: MTI/Máthé Zoltán Fotó: Máthé Zoltán

Ezalenyeg.hu, funded by billions from abroad, and its backer Oraculum 2020 Ltd. have run a nationwide campaign-media empire. The owner of the publisher is Zoltan Pava, who used to receive multi-million euro contracts as a consultant from the leftist Gyurcsany-Bajnai governments, and who currently works as the managing director of Eagle Eye Marketing, a company that provides services to the opposition Democratic Coalition's (DK) political faction.
Set up in a bid to influence the results of last April's elections, the 81 local sub-sites, chiefly defamatory in nature, included a number of bulletin boards with political messages which, judging by their headlines, had nothing to do with public life.

Among others, however, sites such as Joke Magazine, Humor Magazine, Recipes.today, Quotes.today or CovidVaccination.info (their names have been translated into English – ed.) have inundated the internet with anti-government content in the days and weeks before the election.

For example Recipes.today (Receptek.ma) began disseminating, in a completely unprofessional way remarks by Ukrainian President Zelensky criticizing PM Orban on election day. They spent astronomical amounts on adverts: for instance nearly HUF 26 million on the site named CovidVaccination.info (Covidoltas.info) until April 3, 2022, while also promoting campaign materials through Jokc Magazine, Humor Magazine, Quotes (Idezo) and Quotes.today (Idezetek.ma), for millions of Hungarian forints until election day.

There are platforms that have spent as much as HUF 100 million on ads. A good example is Ez van (This is it), a Facebook page set up in July 2021, which backed and promoted 450 posts from this amount.

After the election, they stopped running these ads abruptly, and most of the above-mentioned sites have not published any content since June 15, 2022.

As is well known, according to a report published by the National Information Center, more than HUF 4 billion came to Hungary from the United States and through a Swiss foundation – with the assistance of David Koranyi's Action for Democracy group –  to support the opposition left wing's election campaign. Around 90 percent of this money went to DatAdat, a data collection company spearheaded by ex-PM Gordon Bajnai, and Oraculum 2020 Ltd.
It is noteworthy that the bookkeeping headquarters of DatAdat and Oraculum 2020 Ltd., as well as the „payola headquarters” of the opposition DK's MEPs are both located in an abandoned building in a small village named Szegi, boasting a population of a few hundred people.

Cover photo: Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony, Benedek Javor, and ex-PM Gordon Bajnai (Photo: MTI/Zoltan Mathe)