Tech companies declare war on right wing

Recently, Facebook has picked up on an old habit of deleting right-wing content with virtually no prior warning or reasons. The latest victims of the tech companies' strictness are the social media pages of Hungary's ruling Fidesz party in Vac and Budapest’s 9th district (Ferencvaros), but earlier, the profiles of popular right-wing journalist Zsolt Bayer and many of Megafon’s opinion leaders were also blocked overnight.

Logos-Stock Pictures Fotó: ARTUR WIDAK

Right-wing content is popular on social media. As Magyar Nemzet has highlighted in a previous article, Viktor Orban's TikTok profile has become a huge success story in just a few days, which has clearly raised some censors' eyebrows at the big tech companies. Last week, one of the most popular social networking sites, Facebook, blocked the official page of ruling Fidesz's local organization in Vac, a settlement near the capital Budapest. "We've asked Facebook for a review, and if it fails, we'll set up a new Facebook account. This is obviously very important. What's weird is that all this has happened in a town that's stifled free speech. The first measure introduced by Mayor Ilona Matkovich was to "muzzle" her staff, to put a gag order on all her employees. So everything can only be done with her permission," Imre Szadoczki, chairman of Fidesz in Vac, told commercial Hir TV.

Tech companies have declared war on the right wing. Photo: Pexels

Mr Szadoczki has called the events particularly outrageous, saying that as the local elections are approaching, they want to reach as many people as possible with their election manifesto on social media. In addition, Fidesz MP Andrea Gyurakovics announced last week on her own social media that Facebook had removed the page of the 9th district organization of Fidesz. The lawmaker did not let the incident pass without comment, stressing in her post that

Facebook's censorship department has already kicked off the 2024 election campaign, the first victim of which is the Facebook page of Fidesz's 9th district (Ferencvaros) organization...

This, however, is not the first time that a tech giant has censored right-wing content. It's worth remembering how Face­book blocked  the page of Zsolt Bayer, a popular Hungarian right-wing publicist, in March this year. – Probably because the journalist has posted too much content criticizing the Biden administration and the Democratic Party recently," the administrator in charge of the Mr Bayer's social media accounts stated at the time. He also said that they had already suffered several restrictions lasting ten, twenty or even thirty days. The journalist's page has been in the red constantly of late, which means that Facebook didn't like his posts. The administrator said they had appealed against the ban, successfully, so the page was made available again the same day. This was not the first time though, as Zsolt Bayer's Facebook account also was temporarily blocked in 2021.

This spring, the censors of YouTube also launched a clampdown and deleted a channel set up by Pesti Sracok (PS, a right-wing online community portal) in September 2022. According to Social Blade, the channel had more than 54,000 subscribers and around 70,000 views a day, but on certain days during the two weeks before the cancellation, it had 240,000 views.

In its statement sent to our newspaper, Google tried to explain why it had taken down Pesti Sracok's channel. "We terminated the YouTube channel of Pesti Sracok, because its creation circumvented our earlier action to terminate their channel, which we removed in February 2020 for violating child safety terms and regulations," they wrote.

It is worth noting that the official Facebook page of Daniel Deak, a senior analyst at the XXI Century Institute and a member of Megafon, was also banned in the spring. Last February, in the midst of the election campaign, Megafon opinion leader Daniel Bohar was also forced to set up a new Facebook profile after his previous page was banned following complaints from left-wing users.

Cover photo: Illustration (Photo: Artur Widak)