Vanessza Juhász, a member of the PRiSMA research group, has published her latest study on the argumentation analysis of Hungarian ruling party candidates and the Megafon influencer agency.
In recent years, Fidesz launched a new political campaign tool in the form of astroturfed influencers: the Megafon influencer agency was established with the explicit aim of training and supporting pro-government political influencers to alter the so-called liberal social media discourse in Hungary. Since its founding in 2020, the agency’s influencers have participated in several election campaigns, spending enormous amounts on advertisements almost exclusively to attack opposition candidates and manipulate social media discourse.
The research explores the use of online influencers in political campaigns and the possible strategies of discourse manipulation, applying argumentation theory. In this study, Juhász analyzed a total of 499 Facebook ads published by Megafon, the Fidesz Facebook page, the party’s candidates, and Viktor Orbán during the campaign period of the 2022 parliamentary elections. She applied Douglas Walton’s (2008) argumentation scheme categorization to identify fallacious reasoning and misleading arguments. She also investigated whether normative statements on social media were followed by supporting arguments.
The results indicate that in most cases, when politicians make evaluative statements based on certain norms, they follow up with some form of justification. However, Megafon influencers not only make such claims but also simplify complex social and political issues through false dilemmas and association fallacies. They actively attempt to persuade voters using heuristics and rhetorically appealing yet manipulative and flawed arguments such as straw man reasoning and personal attacks.
In contrast, pro-government politicians make significantly fewer normative claims in their posts, allowing them to avoid reliance on argumentative fallacies. On the other hand, more than half of Viktor Orbán’s ads contained normative judgments, yet the Prime Minister provided some form of justification in only one-third of his content. These findings contrast with contemporary literature, which links populist discourse to errors in reasoning (Macagno, 2022; Blassnig et al., 2019; Ferreira, 2021). However, they further explain the role of political influencers to whom traditional political actors can outsource flawed but persuasive arguments, as well as negative campaigning (Bene & Juhász, 2025).
The full article is available in Hungarian in the latest issue of Politikatudományi Szemle.