Hungarian Conservative

MCC Feszt will be returning to Esztergom for the fourth time this year. The event will feature distinguished speakers tackling world events, such as Minister of EU Affairs János Bóka of Hungary and American political strategist Chris Rufo, and some of the most popular Hungarian musical acts as well.

‘The story of the maid Anna Édes is the story of undiagnozed or unrecognized mental illnesses and their consequences, in contrast to today’s societies, primarily in the West, where mental illness is advocated to the point of virtue and people are ‘pressured’ to have mental illnesses as a mark of social status.’

Social media plays a significant role in young people’s lives: according to research conducted by the Hungarian Media Authority, children use popular social media sites daily. The aim of the publication is to discuss the risks, impacts, and opportunities of social media usage in a context that is easily understandable for young people, allowing them to form their own opinions on the topic.

‘The Internet, for all its premises as a beacon of knowledge, now resembles more of a digital information wasteland. It’s not that there aren’t well-written essays or long-form articles out there. It’s not as if one cannot find quality, deep content if one seeks it out. It’s just that we’re overwhelmed by the popcorn.’

The attempted assassination of Robert Fico has led to a significant rise in death threats against European leaders, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Máté Kocsis, the Fidesz parliamentary group leader, attributes this escalation partly to left-wing media, accusing them of mastering hate speech and biased reporting.

Conservative Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s speech at CPAC Hungary 2024 discussing the demographic changes in Europe was removed for a ‘hate speech’ violation on YouTube. On X, however, the speech remains, garnering over 50 million views in a week.

‘Rather than an extremist group exploiting a social media platform to recruit vulnerable people, what took place last week appears to be quite the opposite. Decentralized local communities, far from governmental reach, are utilizing social media platforms to hype themselves up into a state where riotous violence becomes a necessary consequence. The ultimate conclusion to this sad series of events is that Egypt, as a centralized authority, is struggling to monitor these autonomous decentralized social media groups, and therefore these “Islamic vigilantism” incidents may continue to occur.’

‘A radical paradigm shift is required in which mental suffering is understood not in isolation, but in relation to consuming and depriving human existence of its roots: family, community, and a transcendental orientation. Only then can Hungarian society, as well as the West as a whole, like a reemerging forest, rediscover itself and create a society based on human flourishing instead of technological determinism; a society full of mentally resilient people with meaningful lives.’

The annual analysis of media consumption showed that in 2023, the attention of news readers was primarily captured by events such as the papal visit, the earthquake in Turkey, the uprising of the Wagner Group, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and the death of Hungarian mountaineer Szilárd Suhajda.

According to the study, 15 per cent of young Hungarians frequently experience feelings of isolation, which is of concern as chronic loneliness not only has psychological ramifications but, in certain cases, also entails physical consequences. The report highlights that 41 per cent of young people in the Western Transdanubia region and 38 per cent of their counterparts in the southern Transdanubia region claim to feel lonely always or often.

While the new liberal government in Poland has brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis within a month, Hungarian MP Márton Tompos from the leftist Momentum party is apparently looking to emulate the Polish Prime Minister, and is threatening with similar retaliation in the low chance of a leftist takeover in Hungary.

Hungary has over 2 million TikTok users. Many Roma creators have popular accounts on the platform. This piece argues that the new social media site should be utilized by the government for their anti-poverty and integration programmes aimed at the Roma people of Hungary.

It would be crucial to allocate the necessary resources to promoting educational and informative content on TikTok that targets the Roma youth, as part of the broader government-funded inclusion programmes. Thanks to TikTok’s omnipresence, such a scheme has the potential of reaching almost all Hungarian Roma youth directly and of proactively influencing their cultural and social development, integration, and desegregation in a cost-effective manner.

The editorial staff believes this is an expression of political bias, and was motivated by the upcoming European Parliamentary elections next year. The last piece of their content flagged by Facebook was of a topic covered by all major news outlets in Hungary.

The Hungarian Prime Minister and his team are clearly in a creative mood: they have published a funnily irreverent Star Wars-themed TikTok video, built on some key sentences in Viktor Orbán’s 23 October speech.

Hyper-democracy is already here, it will grow stronger, and we are only starting to understand its profound effects. Some of them will be detrimental, others will open up new opportunities. This might appear overwhelming and unprecedented to some, but in truth, that was the case with all great technological or political upheavals…

‘Thanks to their huge user base, the largest social media sites have become unavoidable power factors, having enormous potential to influence public thinking. They can determine who, how and what can say, although this is done mostly indirectly, through business-interests- driven algorithms. Yielding to the pressure of progressive and woke ideologues, most service providers also develop principles of behaviour expected on their platform, and those who allegedly do not conform can be cancelled.’

A large portion of the 15–39-year-olds polled by MCC’s Youth Research Institute shares their political opinions on the internet, and many of them had the experience of being banned for it on social media sites. Also, the majority of young people believe that the social media companies’ algorithms are politically biased.

The American actor, who played drug enforcement agent Hank Schrader, the brother-in-law and nemesis of Walter White in the iconic series, posted about the family holiday on his social media accounts last week.

‘Belligerents in a war never like to acknowledge that there is some intermediation and thus that there is some work to do together with the other side. And therefore, it is always difficult. In that sense, we didn’t experience anything new in the context of Ukraine.’

Two major pieces of news broke in the last couple of days involving Former US President Donald Trump. On Friday, he posted to his Facebook and YouTube accounts for the first time after an over two-year-long ban. The next day, however, he took to his own social media site claiming that he would be arrested on Tuesday.

Rodrigo Ballester, head of the Centre of European Studies at MCC, talked to Hungarian Conservative about the dangers of echo chambers, big tech cannibalising content, and the risks of EU institutions overregulating the press.

On Day 2 of MCC’s ‘The Future of Publishing’ conference, a panel consisting of Israeli influencer Yair Netanyahu, German journalist Roland Tichy and Megafon founder István Gergely Kovács discussed the success stories of their online enterprises.

Since all of Tate’s views greatly rely on blaming a system that intentionally represses their ‘truth’, censoring them only adds fuel to the fire.

Western newspapers massively amplified ISIS and gave it a global brand.

Let us consider a few examples, the most widely accessed sources of international news to represent that Hungary is increasingly and undeservedly depicted negatively. 

The problem with social media is that the business model—the medium itself—is founded on not just a misunderstanding, but an exclusion, of what it is to be human.

If leftist media platforms are so progressive, and lament the small proportion of females in the Hungarian parliament and the alleged sad state of women’s equity in Hungary, how come they treat female politicians the way they do and why do they have so few female journalists?

Extensive moderation, which does not shy away from deletion, will carry platforms far from their initial democratic achievement, making them gatekeepers that can be manipulated more easily than in any previous medium of communication.

‘The IT giants are often more a part of our lives than our own families, and are slowly coming to know more about us not just than the state, but than we ourselves know’