In Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary election, a new form of influencer strategy emerged, centered around a pro-government agency called Megafon. Created two years before the vote, Megafon trained and funded a group of “Astroturf influencers” who—while formally unaffiliated—became key players in the campaign. This study explores how these influencers outspent official actors on Facebook advertising, dominated engagement metrics, and took over the emotionally charged, attack-driven communication that parties typically avoid—revealing a new, underexamined layer of modern digital campaigning.
Political influencers are becoming increasingly central to contemporary election campaigns. In some cases, they voice political opinions out of personal conviction; in others, they are enlisted by campaign organizations to amplify specific messages. However, during the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election, a new strategy emerged: an agency founded for this explicit purpose—Megafon—created, trained, and promoted pro-government influencers. These actors quickly became the most visible figures in the campaign, largely due to their enormous advertising budget, which enabled them to appear in the daily digital feeds of Hungarian social media users.
This research investigates the role of these influencers in the overall pro-government social media campaign, focusing on how specific campaign functions were outsourced to them from formal electoral actors.
The Concept of Astroturf Influencing
Astroturfing refers to coordinated political messaging that mimics authentic grassroots expression. In this model, influencers appear to be ordinary citizens or independent content creators voicing their personal views. In reality, they operate as part of a top-down campaign strategy. Unlike traditional political influencers, who emerge organically, astroturf influencers are purpose-built and supported to achieve explicit political objectives.
Hungary’s media landscape is highly polarized. Public trust in mainstream media is low, while social media—particularly Facebook—has become a primary source of political information. After suffering notable defeats in the 2019 local elections, the ruling party Fidesz identified the underrepresentation of pro-government voices on these platforms as a key weakness. In response, it adopted a more proactive digital strategy with Megafon at its center.
Founded in 2020, Megafon represents a textbook case of an astroturfing operation. Although formally independent from Fidesz, the agency recruits and supports influencers aligned with the government’s agenda. These individuals receive professional training, promotional assistance, and significant advertising resources. Despite official claims of autonomy, leaked correspondence confirms substantial coordination between Megafon and Fidesz’s digital campaign team.
Given this context, it is reasonable to consider Megafon’s influencers as integral actors within the pro-government campaign apparatus. This raises a critical question: what specific campaign functions are most effectively carried out by astroturf influencers? To explore this, the study compared the Facebook activity of four key groups: Megafon’s 10 listed influencers, Viktor Orbán (as party leader), the Fidesz party page, and the 106 Fidesz candidates running in single-member districts.
Disproportionate Visibility and Spending
The first part of the analysis focused on two visibility indicators: organic user engagement (likes, shares, comments) and advertising expenditure. The findings reveal that Megafon influencers dominated on both fronts, particularly in terms of paid promotions. Together, the ten Megafon influencers generated 64% of the reactions and 75% of the shares achieved by the 106 district candidates combined.
More significantly, their advertising spending far exceeded that of all other actors. According to conservative estimates, Megafon’s ad budget reached nearly 1.1 million USD—almost twice the combined ad spend of Fidesz, Orbán, and the 106 candidates (around 600,000 USD). For comparison, during the 2019 European Parliamentary election campaign, the total combined Facebook ad spend by all parties across 28 EU countries was between 500,000 and 1.6 million USD. These figures highlight just how extensively the ten Megafon influencers dominated the Hungarian social media campaign space.
Division of Campaign Functions
The next analytical step was to determine whether the influencers served distinct campaign functions. To answer this, the study conducted manual content analysis of Facebook ads posted by each actor group. Drawing on Benoit’s functional theory of campaign communication and frameworks concerning emotional appeals, a clear division of labor emerged:
- Electoral actors (Orbán, Fidesz, candidates) concentrated on positive messaging: acclaim, policy-oriented content, and emotional tones such as pride and enthusiasm.
- Megafon influencers, by contrast, focused on negative campaigning: 78% of their ads were attack-oriented, primarily targeting the personal character of opposition leaders.
This division of labor is a strategically sound approach in today’s campaign environment. Negative, fear-driven messaging and attacks on opponents’ credibility can have a strong impact on voters. However, research has shown that overly negative messaging from politicians may backfire, reducing their appeal. Influencers, who are not candidates themselves, are insulated from such electoral risks. By outsourcing these high-risk communications to influencers, political actors benefit from the impact without bearing the reputational cost. While the influencers absorbed the task of character attacks and emotional provocation, electoral actors were free to focus on policy content and community-building narratives.
Implications for Campaign Regulation and Democratic Integrity
Megafon’s operation illustrates how formal independence can be used to circumvent legal and regulatory oversight. As a non-party entity, it is not subject to Hungary’s campaign finance rules, which require parties to report donors and adhere to spending limits. Megafon, by contrast, can raise and spend large sums—nearly a third of the legal national campaign expenditure limit—without disclosing its funding sources. This creates a significant transparency gap.
The case underlines how social media has enabled new, less accountable forms of political communication. Influencers can be instrumentalized to bypass formal legal constraints, contributing to a more emotionally charged, personalized, and fragmented political discourse. In the case of Hungary, Megafon effectively functioned as a “long-range character assassination machine,” specializing in highly emotive and symbolic communication tactics commonly associated with right-wing populism.
While the Hungarian case is shaped by its specific political context, the structural conditions that enabled it—platform infrastructure, influencer culture, and regulatory blind spots—exist in many democratic settings. Unless these gaps are addressed through reform, similar strategies may proliferate elsewhere.
As digital campaigning becomes more sophisticated, the Megafon example highlights both the potential and the democratic risks of outsourcing political communication to unofficial, yet tightly coordinated, actors.