What is behind Hungarian sanctions imposed on Facebook?

Photo: www.facebook.com/MarkZuckerberg

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

the Economic Competition Office actually imposed a fine of 1.2 billion forints (more than 3 million euros) on the company

for collecting data on users and their activities and generating enormous profits for themselves using this information.

Tech companies have been under pressure for a while now to find a solution when it comes to fake news and instigation that contribute quite a lot to the fast spread of extreme political views. Many people push for fact-checking on Facebook, and when the ads are false, the web page is urged to give back the money and not publish these news.

Facebook listened and acted accordingly, for instance, by the creation of its own “Supreme Court” (with a Hungarian member about whom you can read here). However, it may have gone a bit too far. Former U.S. president Donald Trump and the fact that he was banned from several platforms generated many responses by leaders, who expressed their disagreement with such a drastic move.

Judit Varga, the Minister on Justice, said that what they want is related to the European Union aims.

The objective is not to control what Facebook can do, post or ban, but to avoid the company to get rid of Hungarian posts or videos without consulting Hungarian Authorities.

They plan to follow the Polish example of setting up a separate court to overview Facebook’s decision on banning content.

In this respect, the government and the opposition are both on the same side; they both say Facebook needs to be regulated to a certain extent; however, further opinions differ.

The opposition says that the most important thing in this question is the motivation behind the censorship.

Of course, this comes from the fact that Facebook is the only platform on which oppositional parties and politicians are much stronger and more present than the governing party.

However, ever since Donal Trump’s issue, the government noted that Facebook and Google need to be stopped because these companies get to choose what they allow to be posted, and this can strongly interfere with the upcoming 2022 parliamentary elections.