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Notes -
Most Hungarians below ~50 or so, like in the rest of the (western) world, are now getting their news from social media, but certainly from online new portals as opposed to traditional mainstream media. Orbán took over a lot of the traditional media, like the county-level (online) newspapers, the public media obviously, but these mainly reach the old generation, pensioners. He did try to, and in some sense managed to, take over the most read news portal Index.hu, but basically when the transfer of ownership happened, the whole staff resigned and then promptly made a competitor Telex.hu, which is by now the second most popular behind Index.hu. And there are other online portals, many professional youtube channels who are against Orbán.
Orbán did try to manufacture social media influencers in a topdown way, this was called Megafon, where they basically received central messaging from the government, they were trained how to produce social media content etc, but it was very fake and weak. Then in the campaign they started the "Fight Club" which was about teaching Orbán-supporters to get into comment fights on Facebook to defend the government. Orbán made a WhatsApp group then a Facebook group for this, and he literally sent a list of topics to comment about, for some time every morning (to tens of thousands of group members, so it was not some super secret thing). Then they made the "Digital Civic Circles", which was basically "Fight Club"-light, basically thematic Facebook groups with some celebrities headlining them, but it was still about receiving a centrally crafted message and lists of Facebook post links that you were supposed to like and put comments on.
Orbán was basically begging people to just spend 10 minutes on this per day, even if this digital world is foreign to many supporters (they are mostly pensioners and rural people). Orbán himself still uses a dumbphone and works on printed paper with pen, and generally hates technology. So him pushing for this shows how much he noticed the problem.
All this to say, nowadays it's not so easy to control the media.
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