Gábor Holló, the CEO of leading news aggregator Hírkereső (the name, ironically, means “Newsfinder”) has recently admitted in an interview with liberal media outlet HVG that he interfered in the Hungarian parliamentary elections by censoring pro-Fidesz material and promoting a news outlet associated with the current prime minister.
Mandiner reports that in the interview, Holló said he used his control over news-ranking algorithms to influence the reach of Hungarian media outlets in line with his political preferences.
In his own words, he did not reduce the reach of “so-called propaganda materials to zero overnight. I reduced their weight by half a percent per week in small steps, while simultaneously boosting the news of independent media. I did this for roughly 200 weeks, since 2022.”
In Holló’s view, content producers that have contracts with his site cannot seek legal remedy because the contracts only require him to display their news, which he did.
“How I distribute the volume to whom is our responsibility. The overwhelming majority of news-reading traffic comes from the rankings, so regulating the algorithm that compiles those rankings is exclusively our right,” Holló told HVG.
As he candidly shared,
At the same time, I was very afraid that I would be exposed. There are traces of this in the code, and if a very smart person had been assigned to investigate it, they could have figured it out.
Holló also admitted to having supported the Tisza Party’s campaign with a total of just over 50 million HUF (approx. € 142,000), primarily by paying for opinion polls. He also felt it was necessary to share that from June 2024 he supported Tisza as a private individual, including providing news-reading traffic to news site Kontroll.hu through his media outlets free of charge. Kontroll.hu happens to be headed by the current Hungarian prime minister’s brother, Mandiner notes.
In light of the conduct of major tech companies such as Meta and TikTok, which blatantly worked against right-wing conservatives with the ‘help’ of their allegedly neutral algorithms, It is not surprising that minor actors resorted to the same. It is, however, unprecedented that a domestic site used the same methods, raising serious legal and ethical questions. It also gives food for thought that the owner of a news aggregator ‘comes out’ in such an overt way–one cannot help but suspect in the hope of securing favours from those who rose to power in part thanks to his manipulation.
