beware, Visegrad 24 is a very problematic source of info (I have seen it posted many times here)

[Celerity]

Polish Misinformation Using a Hungarian Recipe: The Curious Case of Visegrád 24

The popular Visegrád 24 Twitter account pretends to be a news agency, but just repackages material with a conservative spin

https://visegradinsight.eu/polish-misinformation-using-a-hungarian-recipe-the-curious-case-of-visegrad-24/



The Visegrád 24 Twitter account has rapidly grown in popularity, but their motivation and funding are far from transparent. While capitalising on Western support for Ukraine, the owners are building a brand to “Make Europe Great Again”, exporting a more successful Polish model initially tested by Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian attempts failed, but the plan stayed alive in Poland: in just two years, Visegrád 24 has grown into one of the largest Central Eastern European information operations in English – despite its total anonymity, opaque funding structure, having no website, lack of original content and with dubious links to the Polish government.

Visegrád 24 Gains Notoriety

From a Hungarian perspective, it is no longer surprising to find a news site has ties to the government, let alone one that spreads illiberal narratives with taxpayers’ money, like in the case of state media. However, this practice has not been widely adopted by Viktor Orbán’s international allies – and this is exactly why, from a democratic standpoint, the Polish attempts to do so at an international level seem daunting at a time when there is an ongoing war in the region. On 31 October 2022, the Polish chancellery allocated 1.4 million PLN (roughly 300 thousand EUR) from the budget reserve for a leisure and health NGO called Action-Life Foundation to implement a public task titled Visegrád 24, a decision signed off by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki without further explanation.

The name might ring a bell, as for the past two years, social media profiles under the same name have gathered hundreds of thousands of followers by aggregating news from the Central Eastern European region, nowadays focused mostly on the war in Ukraine. However, a sports NGO receiving state funds for a news site is only one of the many dubious chapters in Visegrád 24’s story. The page claims to aggregate and curate news, politics, current affairs, history and culture from Central and Eastern Europe. It first appeared on Twitter in January 2020, gaining 324,000 followers to date, as well as an audience of 153,000 on TikTok and 7,000 on both Facebook and Instagram. However, unlike other regional sites like Visegrad Insight, which produces original, English-language analytical content, Visegrád 24 creates virtually no original material; it relies solely on re-sharing and re-posting information, and its website, Visegrád24.org serves only as a donation page for the unnamed authors.

Origin of Misinformation

It is especially interesting to see how they have earned a name for themselves. Posting fake news at the beginning of the war, such as Leonardo DiCaprio donating 10 million USD to Ukraine or PornHub blocking access to its page from Russia, but Visegrád 24 was reportedly the first international social media feed to publish a video of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin dancing with her friends at a house party in August 2022. With her country waiting for its accession to NATO, releasing such footage was logically thought to be in the interest of someone whose agenda would benefit from a scandal around Marin herself – thus the efforts to find the people behind Visegrád 24, which has been set up from Poland using a Polish phone number, rejuvenated.

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[chowder66]

1. Yeah I blocked them awhile back.