What is behind Hungarian sanctions imposed on Facebook?

Social media giant Facebook has been the scene and the source of some serious incidents happening worldwide. If we think about the riot at the U.S. Capitol or the current ongoing issue between the platform and the Australian government, it does not come as a big surprise that many countries feel the urge to control Facebook somehow. Hungary is not an exception either.

The core of the issue is

whether a private company should have the power to control and regulate the most important fields of publicity.

It has become such an essential question in Hungary that the government already announced its intentions to issue a proposal this Spring, a law controlling the social media platform to a certain extent.

The situation is quite complicated and has changed rapidly in the past years. On the one hand, the government claims that these private companies possessing a huge role in our everyday lives conduct censorship on certain videos or movies by blocking or deleting them.

Some years ago, most of the politicians of the governing parties were not present on social media. Trying to change the situation, Fidesz politicians and PM Orbán Viktor himself started to be more involved in the platform’s life during the last year, while, for instance, a separate team of many people is working behind the profile of Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 

On the other hand, after the parliamentary elections of 2018, where Fidesz was victorious again, it turned out that a vast amount of paid ads and videos were placed on Facebook, all related to the governing parties. Why do they want to impose sanctions on then, one might ask, if they might have benefitted from the platform?

The answer arrived some months later with the big surprise at the municipal elections when Fidesz was surprisingly beaten by the opposition in many districts all over the country. Suddenly, they called on Facebook for not being fair and censoring many of their contents and rightist opinions related to the elections.

However, when it comes to parties’ political advertisements, Fidesz spent more money than all opposition parties altogether between March and December of 2019.

Still, after the municipal elections, the state itself questioned the fairness of Facebook and