I've met Hungarian people in the Netherlands and they're doing everything they can to become Dutch. One Hungarian even speaks fluent with no accent, and that is quite a feat.
I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.
Hungarian population have been declining for decades [1]. Hungary has already lost 5% of their population since 2010. For comparison their neighbour the Czech Republic has been growing [2].
For what it's worth I had a conversation with someone in the same situation just the other day. They have a Hungarian passport but currently live in the Netherlands. They're not thrilled with the prospect of having to nationalize as Dutch, just due to all the bureaucracy, but they're getting the ball rolling now vs waiting to see how things pan out.
Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.
Others are backdoors.
China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now
----
Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:
Equating the west, to Russia is such an unserious opinion.
The west has it's problems, don't get me wrong, but generally we have liberal democracies, which are more free, successful, better on human rights, and have the capability to improve the world(as it has).
Russia is an interesting case as it has a president for life (China has gone this way too) and if your billions aren't available to said president you fall out a windows. The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.
Equating two "bad" things as if they weren't worlds apart in gravity is baby's first fallacy. An ingrown toenail and the Holocaust are not the same thing.
Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue. Any nation that wishes to remain truly sovereign, particularly in the English-speaking world is going to have to grasp the nettle and block or force divesture of Meta & the other US social media giants.
Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.
There's zero overlap between banning social media for kids and banning news from Rupert.
P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.
Completely agree with this. There's a reason the FCC exists and it has nothing to do with electromagnetic frequencies. This agency, just like the Fed, needs to be broken away from politics completely. It's almost too late.
The people most susceptible to consensus mirage are, by the very nature of the beast, the ones least aware of it happening to themselves. Any opinion that you find yourself praised for by any of the groups in your social circle is infinitely suspect.
> Any opinion that you find yourself praised for by any of the groups in your social circle is infinitely suspect.
It is insidious how easily we divide ourselves into rival tribes. For too many it's not enough to feel belonging within a group, they/we crave others to look down upon or fight. IMO we are our best when we can debate ideas dispassionately, without defining ourselves by them.
Just the price of the account doesn't mean much alone. The other important factor is how easily the account can get (shadow)banned from the region you are trying to influence. And for the price given we just know it's account. We don't know how sketchy it appears to the provider.
Not all accounts are created equal. For example a verified US account will be cheaper than a verified Japan account because Japan has stricter regulations around phone numbers. And then if you don't have a Japan account you might not be able to reach a potential Japanese audience due to not only antitrust of the platform, but also features that use geolocation for relevance.
That ignores a huge part of how spam detection works. It’s way more complex than buying some accounts.
You’d need thousands of IP addresses / proxies that aren’t flagged and a non suspicious phone number, plus various other signals like browser automation detection and other advanced bot detection.
There’s a reason those Asian spam offices are like slave camps. They use real people because they need to. It’s a whole sophisticated operation.
Take a look at the YouTube algorithm. If those other accounts aren't in the same cohorts as your target audience you aren't going to accomplish much. The idea that accounts are fungible like they were 2 decades ago isn't true.
> It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.
That's just how populist messaging works, even before the internet. You say outrageous stuff on the radio and then people listen - just ask Adolf Hitler.
We know, for sure, it works - particularly when the medium is new and people haven't built up a strong sense of discernment.
I'm a vegan and its insane the number of bots, who the meat industry pays for, that promote really weird anti-vegan ideas on social media.
This stuff spreads into real life. I run into folks IRL who repeat the same lines the bots do.
What online bots are amazing for is amplification. They take an idea that already exists and blast opposition with comments promoting their misinformation. This then lends some credence to their idea so when grandma Google's it there is discourse on it, or Fox can use online quotes to say "Hey, people are talking!!"
A lot of the weird shit Trump talks about is bot-promoted misinformation. Like, A LOT.
There have been whole subreddits that are just bots and paid PR folks promoting weird stuff or they try to "disprove" things like solar panels or vegan diets.
With online bot stuff it isn't about quality. It's about repetition until the ideas land with someone. It's very cheap to blast people with negativity. Eventually it lands.
So, it totally works when used correctly. I think to most people that's pretty obvious.
The fact countries(state sanctioned) pour a good amount of money and resources into these bot farms proves they work.
Of course they do. And yes there is proof for AI chatbots now, see the link in the other post, but in the last 10 years (since the Cambridge Analytica purchase by Bob Mercer) the usage was sock puppet networks and basic auto reply bots. However, they were microtargeted to individual psychology. So yes they work.
We now have multiple networks discovered in multiple countries, ie Analytica, Team Jorge in Israel, Internet Research Agency in Russia. And that's the ones we know about. Why would multiple countries double down on an idea that doesn't work?
Every right wing movement in Europe that had any contact with Bannon through his "The Movement" "data analytics" training program has all the outer appearances of running a large bot program, now using LLMs. In Portugal for the origins of the bot network they traced them in Angola. In Brasil the origin was Israel.
They’d probably have to outsource it. It’d be very expensive hiring thousands of people to do it in Europe full time and they have to be native Russian/hungarian speakers to not get immediately caught. They’d have to be connected to the pulse of the local culture.
Popular posts on Twitter, Facebook etc have tens of thousands of likes and comments. It’d be a major operation to do it and might not push the needle.
The scale of the Russian one caught in the US in 2016 was pretty small. They were spent about $400k on FB/twitter while the campaigns spent about $2 billion and PACs spent $4 billion (about 15,000x more).
In the US, it's relatively inexpensive to buy up radio and TV stations and newspapers in low population states, then flood the zone with must-run pieces aimed at manufacturing consent for a particular worldview. That delivers a voting majority of a minimum of 1 representative and exactly 2 senate primed to favor a particular set of values and political objectives. Doesn't even require cheating by racial gerrymandering. (Political gerrymandering was legalized by SCOTUS in the 2019 Rucho case.)
Readit News
https://telex.hu/english/2025/12/11/most-hungarians-fear-rus...
They are also doing everything to bypass the no-political-ads-on-facebook ban https://telex.hu/english/2025/10/29/despite-the-ban-fidesz-c...
I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Czech_Repu...
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I love (hate) this:
Western rich people are billionaires.
Russian rich people are oligarchs.
Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.
Others are backdoors.
China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now
----
Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE
(I don't know where else to mention this, this conversation seemed close enough to be relevant)
Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.
P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.
Do you have any examples ?
It is insidious how easily we divide ourselves into rival tribes. For too many it's not enough to feel belonging within a group, they/we crave others to look down upon or fight. IMO we are our best when we can debate ideas dispassionately, without defining ourselves by them.
Not all accounts are created equal. For example a verified US account will be cheaper than a verified Japan account because Japan has stricter regulations around phone numbers. And then if you don't have a Japan account you might not be able to reach a potential Japanese audience due to not only antitrust of the platform, but also features that use geolocation for relevance.
You’d need thousands of IP addresses / proxies that aren’t flagged and a non suspicious phone number, plus various other signals like browser automation detection and other advanced bot detection.
There’s a reason those Asian spam offices are like slave camps. They use real people because they need to. It’s a whole sophisticated operation.
Or as John Wanamaker said : "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"
And having worked in digital advertising for 20+ years, I'd be shocked if they are anywhere as effective as often claimed.
It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.
That's just how populist messaging works, even before the internet. You say outrageous stuff on the radio and then people listen - just ask Adolf Hitler.
We know, for sure, it works - particularly when the medium is new and people haven't built up a strong sense of discernment.
Like social media. Uh oh.
For example, you can associate an unpopular celebrity or sports team with a political movement, driving its approval down.
Also, you don't need _those_ accounts to change votes, you need to create small viral effects that will cause people to start spreading ideas.
I'm a vegan and its insane the number of bots, who the meat industry pays for, that promote really weird anti-vegan ideas on social media.
This stuff spreads into real life. I run into folks IRL who repeat the same lines the bots do.
What online bots are amazing for is amplification. They take an idea that already exists and blast opposition with comments promoting their misinformation. This then lends some credence to their idea so when grandma Google's it there is discourse on it, or Fox can use online quotes to say "Hey, people are talking!!"
A lot of the weird shit Trump talks about is bot-promoted misinformation. Like, A LOT.
There have been whole subreddits that are just bots and paid PR folks promoting weird stuff or they try to "disprove" things like solar panels or vegan diets.
With online bot stuff it isn't about quality. It's about repetition until the ideas land with someone. It's very cheap to blast people with negativity. Eventually it lands.
So, it totally works when used correctly. I think to most people that's pretty obvious.
The fact countries(state sanctioned) pour a good amount of money and resources into these bot farms proves they work.
We now have multiple networks discovered in multiple countries, ie Analytica, Team Jorge in Israel, Internet Research Agency in Russia. And that's the ones we know about. Why would multiple countries double down on an idea that doesn't work?
Every right wing movement in Europe that had any contact with Bannon through his "The Movement" "data analytics" training program has all the outer appearances of running a large bot program, now using LLMs. In Portugal for the origins of the bot network they traced them in Angola. In Brasil the origin was Israel.
Popular posts on Twitter, Facebook etc have tens of thousands of likes and comments. It’d be a major operation to do it and might not push the needle.
The scale of the Russian one caught in the US in 2016 was pretty small. They were spent about $400k on FB/twitter while the campaigns spent about $2 billion and PACs spent $4 billion (about 15,000x more).
Maybe have YC invest in some startups combatting this using machine learning?
(Given the focus of HN it's typically some product being pushed, though. Not a politician.)
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