A little over 12 months ago, on 11th of January 2022 we published our first article on Lakmusz titled: Fidesz uses misleading statistics to fight “gender-change surgery craze” in the West. More than 40 thousand people visited our site on that first day alone, and Lakmusz took the Hungarian media scene by storm. Over the course of the next 12 months, we reached close to 2 million people, exceeding even our most optimistic expectations, becoming the largest anti-disinformation and fact-checking website in Hungary, and among the most popular in Europe.
We built domestic and international partnerships, laid the groundwork for a volunteer community, began working on a media literacy program and weathered attacks during the past 12 months.
The popularity of Lakmusz can be explained by a combination of factors, some lucky, some mundane, some tragic: the dedication of the newsroom, our cooperation with 444.hu, the large news site of our publisher showcasing our content, the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. But beyond these important components, there was also a great thirst in the Hungarian public discourse for high quality, reliable, verified information after years of media capture, centralization and propaganda.
Anti-disinformation and fact-checking work (like other forms of journalism) is only meaningful in the context of its audience. We create content so our readers (viewers, listeners) can make informed decisions about their lives, health and security. If we are successful, we are successful through our audience, and we are humbled by their trust and support.
Success and impact is not just about big numbers, and we are especially proud that some of our work reached smaller communities, the people most vulnerable to disinformation.
Late last year we began visiting “tanoda”s, after school community centers for disenfranchised, youths (mostly from Hungary’s Romani minority) to talk about news, social media and disinformation together with the Civil College Foundation and we also went to highschools and visited student organizations to talk about the mediaspace and our work. Early 2022, soon after the Russian invasion began the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union used our digital content to create flyers for small, rural communities to help people navigate the complex wartime information environment.
Some of our work was recognized beyond our borders, and we were asked to speak about media freedom, propaganda and disinformation from Berlin to Taipei. We also got an extension: Lakmusz started as a “small-scale” media project with funding from the European Commission for 13 months but now we are part of the Hungarian Digital Media Observatory consortium that is going to work on disinformation issues for 30 months from the beginning of 2023.
The trust of our audience, the impact of our work and the professional recognition got us through some difficult moments during the year. Even the mere announcement of Lakmusz was met with neary universal hostility in the government controlled media sphere and some of our work, especially on far-right groups spreading Russian propaganda, provoked vicious attacks in the digital space. We are learning to build resilience within the newsroom and trust outside, with the audience as various actors try to intimidate our staff and undermine the public’s trust in our work.
We expect the next 30 months to be as rewarding and challenging as our past year.
In our report below, we are detailing our activities carried out in 2022, in 5 chapters:
1.1. Audience: almost 2 million readers
Although some journalists and NGOs in Hungary have been involved in fact-checking before, there was no dedicated fact-checking organization in the mainstream media - until we launched Lakmuszt in January 2022.
The original goal of our project was to reach 1 million readers in one year. However, the launch of Lakmusz on 11 January 2022 showed that the Hungarian audience had a strong demand for a fact-checking site: we met our one-year target in less than 5 months and reached a total of 1.9 million readers by the end of the first phase of the project.
1.2. Main disinformation narratives
The first months of our operation were marked by two major events: the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February and the Hungarian general elections in early April. The war became one of the main themes of the election campaign, and political and war-related disinformation spread intertwined through various channels, through parts of the mainstream press and social media. The April elections did not bring any significant change in the Hungarian disinformation space, while the prolonged Russian-Ukrainian war had an increasing impact on the daily life of the public worldwide: in the second half of the year, we found that misinformation was spreading in the Hungarian public sphere mainly about the domestic political and economic aspects of the war. In addition, fake news on scientific and health issues continued to easily go viral on social media, and some of this was amplified in the Hungarian public discourse by the Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) party, which got into parliament in April.
1.3. The claims checked: topics and sources
In 12 months (11 January 2021 - 11 January 2022), a total of 262 articles were published on Lakmusz. Of these, 161 articles were checked for specific claims.
Of our fact-checks, 32 were about disinformation about the Russian-Ukrainian war, 92 were about public life, politics and the economy, 23 were about public health issues, but we also wrote several articles about fake news about education, migration, climate change and the LGBTQ+ community.
Source of information we have verified:
Of the fact-checks published on Lakmusz, 34 were written by AFP journalists.
We take the utmost care when writing our articles, but if we make a mistake, we corret it in a transparent manner. Out of the 262 articles published in our first year of operation, we have modified or clarified the text after publication in the case of 15 articles, on points that do not affect the substance of the article. We have not been sued for press rectification by anyone.
1.4. Beyond fact-checking
Alongside our fact-checks, we also produced a number of pieces that sought to explore the workings of the disinformation environment from different perspectives. For example
Our most read articles:
1.5. Social media and new formats
Lakmusz has a growing presence on social media:
Our social media platforms give us the opportunity to reach more people with our content, beyond the readership of our website. For example, our podcasts and posts about them have reached more than 300,000 people on various social media platforms and have generated more than 6,000 different reactions (shares, likes, comments).
Although we mainly produced traditional text articles, we started experimenting with other formats shortly after our launch.
One of the most difficult tasks for newsrooms fighting the spread of false and misleading information is to disseminate content. Those who regularly read fact-checking sites as part of their own conscious media consumption tend to be less susceptible to disinformation, and vice versa: those who are most vulnerable to misleading content are the least likely to read the sites that deal with it.
Since the launch of Lakmusz, we have been involved in a number of initiatives that seek to address this contradiction. In the Civil College Foundation project, we visit schools to talk to the children and their parents about the spread of false and misleading information. Members of the newsroom have held several workshops for high school and university students, NGOs and journalists.
In December we launched a series of online workshops on how to talk to people who base their worldview on misinformation. The aim of the training is to give people the tools they need to take action against the spread of misinformation - and to build the Lakmus volunteer community. The aim of these experiments is not only to increase the reach of Lakmusz, but also to promote critical, balanced media consumption as widely as possible.
In the run-up to the elections, Lakmusz became one of the Hungarian partners of the Who Targets Me project. In Hungary, Lakmusz invited more than 1800 users to download the browser extension, which anonymously collected information on who targeted users with political ads and why. Lakmusz analyzed the data in cooperation with TASZ and the Civil Liberties Union for Europe. The findings of the research were reported by Civil Liberties Union and referred to in Human Right Watch's analysis of data use in the Hungarian elections.
Since March 2022, Lakmusz has been involved in the Disinformation Situation Centre, a collaboration organised by Reset.tech. The aim of the project is to study the spread of pro-Russian propaganda in Europe, Ukraine and the United States and to assess the response of big tech companies.
As part of the Science+ programme, we have put more emphasis on live talks and podcasts, launching Lakmusz's own podcast channel. We wrote articles supported by the "Get the Trolls Out" and the "EDE - Together Against Disinformation" project, and received funding from Kinzen for social media research.
The considerable attention that has accompanied the work of Lakmusz has inevitably brought with it attacks on the newsroom, aimed at intimidating our staff and undermining readers' trust. (The attacks on the editorial staff are not the same as the corrections to individual articles, which we described earlier.)
The government-controlled media had already covered us in several articles before Lakmusz was launched, but the most heated emotions were aroused by our pieces on Russian propaganda, especially when we showed how Russian disinformation was being presented in the statements of certain Hungarian public figures. After our article on the Youtube channel of László Toroczkai, the president of Mi Hazánk, former Member of Parliament András Schiffer declared that fact-checkers are "the greatest enemies of freedom in the world".
Schiffer, Torockzkai and others have a significant online following, and after their statements, online harassment, personal, hateful and threatening messages against Lakmusz staff increase significantly. In such cases, we consult a lawyer to assess what action we should take.
In order to be as transparent as possible, and at least partly to prevent certain attacks, we have updated the FAQ and the "About us”section of our website twice this year, where you can read about the principles and methodology of our work, the people in the newsroom and our funding.
Lakmusz’s content are routinely carried by the Hungarian media (Telex, HVG, 24.hu, RTL, Blikk, among others) and we are happy to see that in addition to Lakmusz, fact-checking has taken root in the mainstream Hungarian media with more and more articles being produced each month.
On the international front, Lakmusz has received a lot of attention since our launch, with Euractiv, Euronews, EU Desinfo Lab, Politico, Libération, Helsinki Times, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc. reporting on our work. Lakmusz’s launch was noted as a positive development for the Hungarian media space in the annual Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford.
We attended several international conferences, with Péter Erdélyi speaking at the European Commission's Future of the Internet conference in Prague about digital disinformation ecosystems and at an event organized by CEDMO about the Hungarian disinformation space. Eszter Neuberger participated as a panelist at the Heinrich Böll Stiftung's "Press and Media Freedom under Pressure" conference in Berlin. Blanka Zöldi spoke on combating disinformation at events in the US and Swedish Embassies, among others, and with Political Capital staff she took part in a week-long study trip to Taiwan, where she shared her experience in ministerial-level meetings and with local NGOs. Szilvi Német was awarded scholarships to attend the BIRN Investigative Summer School and the Amsterdam Winter School, where she spent a week each to deepen her knowledge of disinformation research.
