Influence operations are often thought of as clandestine meddling in other countries’ affairs, but what if it’s more insidious than that? What if, right in front of our eyes, a NATO ally and EU Member State had developed a system to consistently peddle Russian talking points at a large scale within its own borders and beyond? This is what Martin Wendiggensen’s research uncovered in the case of Hungary.

Hungary’s media ecosystem is controlled by the state. Years of corrupt dealings brought hundreds of news outlets – print, radio, television, and internet – under the control of oligarchs loyal to the state. And the state is very friendly to Russia. In time, the vast majority of these outlets were gifted, free of charge, to a holding controlled by the prime minister’s close confidants.

To prove the existence of an at-scale and continuous influence operation, Martin and his collaborators collected all coverage of Ukraine from major news outlets and analyzed their dataset with Semi-Supervised Machine Learning. The picture that emerged was stark: an ensemble of striking narratives aligned with Russian interests in denigrating Ukraine and the West. Moreover, these narratives were present well before the start of the war in 2020.

Matching their findings with an archive of Russian media, they were able to show how the narratives aligned topically, tonally, and in bias. Crucially, they could show a clear temporal lag. In other words, vast sections of Hungarian media actively pick up Russian narratives and amplify them. The effects of this reach beyond Hungary’s own borders, as hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians live in the “near abroad” (neighboring countries) and in the diaspora, thereby giving the controllers of Hungarian media outsized political influence abroad. This dark alignment of narratives runs deeper than words, leading the investigation to the staged firebombing of a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine, and an obscure Cold War-era “spy bank” that is actively circumventing sanctions on Russia.

As electorates across the US and Europe go to the polls in 2024, this must-see presentation on large-scale state influence operations could hardly be more timely or relevant.

About the Author

Martin Wendiggensen is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Alperovitch Institute, focusing on Great Power Competition in Cyberspace, especially competition around AI and state-sponsored information operations. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science with a focus on quantitative methods and Natural Language Processing from the University of Mannheim and studied in China, Israel, and Italy. After working as policy advisor to a member of the German National Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Martin received a Master’s degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS. He has conducted research at NATO as well as the University of Mannheim, and applied his knowledge in Artificial Intelligence at his own small startup, which won contracts to monitor electoral environments. Currently, he is conducting research on AI-generated content using Advanced Research Computing at Hopkins.

About LABScon

This presentation was featured live at LABScon 2023, an immersive 3-day conference bringing together the world’s top cybersecurity minds, hosted by SentinelOne’s research arm, SentinelLabs.

Keep up with all the latest on LABScon 2024 here.