"A girl from Celldömölk in Újpest, life has brought me here. This is where I work and live with my cat," writes Enikő Surány in her Facebook profile. Enikő is an active participant in public debates in Újpest's online public sphere, regularly posting in the district's social media platform.
On 17 June 2023, she shared a post in two Facebook groups that Dávid Nagy, a politician of the Hungarian MKKP in Újpest, would like to have "homeless-friendly" benches in a park under renovation in the district instead of benches that are impossible to lie down on.
"I don't want homeless people in the new park. A homeless-friendly bench is not the solution to the problem in any form."
- declared Enikő Surány in one and then in the other Facebook groups.
She also had friends: in the same two Facebook groups, which together have almost 30,000 members: a user called Adrienn Vörös also made a statement on the subject.
Vörös also shared video footage of Újpest's municipal media, in which residents tell us what and who they think the public benches are for.
Whatever these people in the video think about the issue, at least they are real.
Unlike Enikő Surány and Adrienne Vörös, who appear to be fake – along with 10 other profiles also identified in Újpest Facebook groups.
These profiles appear in a district, which was taken over by the opposition coalition from Fidesz in 2019. Mayor Tibor Déri, who was elected as a candidate of Momentum, a left-wing opposition party, but has since moved to DK (the opposition party with the most voters), has already announced his retirement, and in the June municipal elections one of the current deputy mayors, Norbert Trippon, also from DK, will be the joint candidate of the opposition. The MKKP, however, will not back Trippon, and will run its candidate, the aforementioned Dávid Nagy, for the mayor's seat. Alongside Zsolt Wintermantel, former mayor of Fidesz, Nagy will be the challenger to the joint opposition candidate in June.
Dávid Nagy also drew the public's attention to the fact that profiles with no real identity have appeared in Újpest Facebook groups and are trying to influence local public discourse. Last year, Nagy wrote a series of blog posts about DK’s smear campaign against him via "propaganda pages", paid political ads on Facebook, and "fake Facebook profiles".
He also pointed to some profiles and claimed that although they seemed to be average local citizens, they were created with a manipulative purpose, to spread messages praising the district’s current leaders and discrediting the opposition.
In this article, we verified the claims of David Nagy.
We have examined in detail 7 of the 8 profiles named by Nagy that still exist and concluded that 5 of them may indeed be fake, and we also identified 7 more profiles that may also belong to the fake profile network in Újpest.
Creating and operating fake profiles on the platform is against Facebook's policies. You can report it to Facebook if you come across fake profiles. And it is a more serious offense to operate a group of Facebook profiles or pages on the social networking site, for example by using fake profiles or paid trolls to flood news and comment feeds. Such "coordinated inauthentic behavior” is supposed to be chased by the platform, and Facebook prepares quarterly reports on the networks that were shut down. But in small languages such as Hungarian, their system is less effective. In Hungary, our partner Political Capital has already uncovered fake profile networks used for manipulation. You can read about their research here and here.
What are the signs that there are fake profiles in the Facebook groups in Újpest? Some different characteristics and signs show us with a high degree of certainty that these are not authentic profiles.
With advances in artificial intelligence (AI), it now takes seconds to create photos that can look lifelike at first glance. Although it's not always easy to tell that they were created by AI, the images often contain errors and inaccuracies that might be suspicious. Several of these can be observed in the profile pictures in the Facebook groups we have investigated.
It can be striking, if you put several suspicious pictures next to each other, that the eyes of different people are almost at the same height and the same distance apart:
This is one of the most important characteristics of a well-known AI image generator program, thispersondoesnotexist.com.
But the use of artificial intelligence may be indicated by the fact that the profile pictures all show faces photographed from the neck up, against a blurred background, and that some of the details are not right in several of the pictures. For example, the AI is still struggling with the elaboration of the jewelry. For example, in the first two photos, you can see this problem in the women's earrings, and in the third photo, the man's necklace blends into his neck.
We used a reverse image search to check whether the images used in the Újpest groups also appear on other platforms. Some profile pictures were found in different corners of the internet: the same photo, but used in other countries under a different name. For example, the photo of Enikő Surány, presented in the introduction, was shown on a site promoting cryptocurrency investment opportunities, with this introduction:
And the profile picture of Viktor Csatár on a Russian social media platform.
There are also closer links between some profiles. The figure below shows profiles that have made their friends list public to strangers, which are "friends" of other fake profiles on Facebook. Some profiles have a total of 2-3 friends, but the profile with the most extensive network of contacts has no more than 133.
The 12 profiles we have identified were created between mid-September 2021 and mid-October 2022. Four of them were registered on the same day (3 December 2021), and their profile pictures were set up within an hour of each other (between 10:18 and 11:12).
Once these profiles were created, almost the first thing they did was join various Facebook groups dealing with local issues.
For example, Enikő Surány and Adrienn Vörös, mentioned in the introduction, joined 4 of the 5 groups they are currently members of on the day they were created. The profile of Ferenc Jánosik joined all his groups on 2 September 2022, when they were created. There is only one profile, Anna Lovász, where there is no such exact overlap, but she joined 3 of the 5 Facebook groups she joined two days after they were created.
The profiles were found in the following six Facebook groups:
The largest is the Újpest Városközpont és Városkapu környéke (Újpest City Centre and City Gate Neighbourhood) group, with more than 20,000 members. All of the fake profiles we identified can be found here, but there is also a very active group of 7600 people in the Újpest Rózsa utca és Víztorony környéke (Rózsa Street and Water Tower area).
And what do the fake profiles do in these groups? Well, almost the same thing. Mostly they enthusiastically share the posts of DK’s deputy mayors of Újpest, Trippon Norbert and Bedő Kata.
Other fake profiles occasionally appear in the comment sections under the posts.
But they have also been used for smear campaigns.
Last summer and autumn, for example, articles and posts were distributed attacking the local MKKP politician David Nagy.
The issue of "homeless-friendly" benches has already been mentioned: in a Facebook post in mid-June last year, Nagy shared his thoughts on the “anti-homeless benches” for the renovated Park. The municipality defended the concept in a memorable communiqué, and the local media started a campaign against Nagy, who wants to "move the homeless people" to the Park.
Last October, in the very same local papers and news sites, articles were published that the MKKP entered into an alliance with the local branch of Fidesz in Újpest and that Zsolt Wintermantel, former mayor of the district conspires with David Nagy when they "simultaneously attack the opposition-led municipality". And most recently, at the end of November, defamatory articles about Nagy appeared in which he was accused of illegal parking and public urination.
All three of the sites are sympathetic to the current city council, but only Újpest News can be identified as DK-affiliated. The imprint shows that the person responsible for the editorial work is László Varju, DK’s Member of Parliament, and the publisher is his company, Euro-Atlantic Integration Nonprofit Ltd.
From Újpesti Szemle articles are published without indicating the source. The portal claims to be "written by enthusiastic, local civilians committed to Újpest and local patriots".
Újpesti Megmondó is a relatively small Facebook page with only 470 followers, created in February this year, and it posts almost exclusively anti-David Nagy and anti-Wintermantel content.
All three sites regularly advertise on Facebook, and according to Facebook’s Ad Library data, a total of 125-159 thousand forints was spent on content attacking David Nagy alone between June and November 2023.
Among the content shared by the fake profiles in the groups, we also found a lot of posts that were distributed as paid political advertising like:
We shared these findings with Újpesti Hírmondó, Újpesti Szemle, and the unknown administrator of Újpesti Megmondó before publishing our article, and asked if they had anything to do with the fake profiles that spread their content. We received a reply from László Varju, editor-in-chief of Újpesti Hírmondó, and Ágnés Jungné Kertai, publisher and responsible editor of Újpesti Szemle.
Varju claims that they do not use fake profiles to distribute their articles, and he does not know who is involved in the distribution. "But we thank everyone who responds or shares our content. Thank God, many people do," he replied.
Ágnes Jungné Kertai also claims that Újpesti Szemle, which is considered a public service media, is "not connected" to fake profiles and does not investigate whether the users sharing its articles are fake or real. He did not give a clear answer to our question as to why they publish articles on their site without an author but said that they include all the information required by the media law. He also did not say how the paper is financed and how they pay for their Facebook ads.
In his blog posts, Dávid Nagy also claims that the fake profile network is run by the DK-led municipality.
However, he does not present any evidence of this, nor have we found any direct evidence. What is certain, however, is that these profiles:
We wrote to DK and the municipality of Újpest to ask them to react to Dávid Nagy's allegations and the statements made in our article. However, they had not replied by the time of publication of our article.
Cover illustration by Emese László
Translated by Benedek Totth
