The April elections did not bring any significant changes in Hungarian politics (Fidesz won the election by another two-thirds majority, while two parties, Momentum and Mi Hazánk entered the parliament as new player), while the effects of the protracted Russian-Ukrainian war are felt on a daily basis all over the world. False information continues to spread in these areas, and we have also continued to focus on these issues in the second quarter of Lakmusz.
Over three months (12 April to 11 July), we published 59 articles, 31 of which were fact-checks. Out of these, 17 related to disinformation about the Russian-Ukrainian war, 12 were to politics and economics, and 4 dealt with medical and health-related disinformation.
The source of the claims we checked were:
In addition, we produced content that seeked to explore from different perspectives how disinformation environment works: we compiled a collection of sites that spread misinformation, described how different mainstream and alternative platforms give space to propaganda, interviewed experts from outside the country and reported on academic research on disinformation.
We continue to produce mainly traditional text-based articles, but we are also increasingly relying on other formats:
We live streamed the talks on Facebook and YouTube, and posted the recordings on all major podcast platforms, including the most interesting snippets in a summary article.
At the end of our second quarter, on 11 July, we held the first meeting of the Lakmusz Advisory Board. We had a lively and insightful discussion during the 90-minute online event, where we assessed the first six months of Lakmusz' operations with the Board members, and addressed questions and comments about the work of Lakmusz. Building on the professional experience of the Board members, we also reflected on our future plans: in particular, how we can take our content beyond our existing readership and to the groups of society that are the most vulnerable to disinformation, and we explored the possibility of organising a community of volunteers to help us fight online disinformation.
During the summer months, we also worked together with two interns at Lakmusz. Boglárka Orbán joined us for three weeks after finishing her secondary school studies, mainly to help us produce our podcasts and launch our TikTok channel. Hanna Solti, who already has a wealth of experience in journalism and podcast production, is working with us two days a week to gain experience in fact-checking.
The original goal of our project was to reach 1 million readers in 1 year. Shortly after our launch in January, it became clear that the Hungarian public had a strong demand for a dedicated fact-checking site - we reached 800,000 readers in our first three months of operation and passed our target of 1 million in mid-May.
In the second quarter of our operation, we reached 460,000 readers. Our most read articles were the following:
Lakmusz is also increasing its follower base on social media:
Our social media platforms provide us with the opportunity to reach more people with our content and increase interaction, beyond the readership of our website. During the quarter, for example, our podcasts and related posts reached more than 300,000 people on various social media platforms and generated more than 6,000 different reactions (shares, likes, comments).
In recent months, we have dealt with several issues that have provoked surprisingly harch, negative reactions from the subjects of our articles, and voices that question the usefulness - and even the right of existence - of fact checking have also appeared in the Hungarian discourse.
After we pointed out in two articles how Russia's war narrative is being spread by László Toroczkai, president of the far-right Mi Hazánk party and by a radical activist Tomcat, both made long videos about Lakmusz journalists, telling their followers that our journalists have launched an unfair attack on them, with the support of “foreign interest and globalist powers”. Later, András Schiffer declared that fact-checkers are "the greatest enemies of freedom in the world".
While none of the information published in our fact checks were refuted or challenged by the subjects of our articles, they made a number of misleading, unsupported claims about the work of Lakmusz. Following their statement, the level of online harassment against journalists - both in public comments and in personal, hateful messages - has increased to unprecedented levels.
Thus, the second quarter of Lakmusz, besides working on content, we also had to find a way to deal with this situation properly. With the help of a lawyer, we have examined whether legal action is warranted for each threat, we have codified our moderation policy on our Facebook page, and we have expanded the "About Us" section of our website, collecting and answering the most frequently asked questions about our work.
We hope that this will help to keep the conversation about misinformation, journalism and fact-checking in Hungary on a constructive track.
by Blanka Zoldi, editor-in-chief and Peter Erdelyi, director
The Hungarian version of the report is available here.
