It’s April 12, 2026, and in the Hungarian city of Pécs, a jubilant crowd is celebrating. They’re cheering for Péter Magyar, the new prime minister, who has just pulled off a political earthquake. Only three days after his party, Tisza, secured a landslide victory, Magyar appeared on the state broadcaster – a channel notorious for 18 months of silence on his movement – and, without skipping a beat, called it a “factory of lies” peddling “propaganda” fit for North Korea or Goebbels. This wasn’t just a bold statement; it was a direct challenge to the media landscape meticulously crafted over 16 years by the outgoing prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and his Fidesz party. Orbán had built a formidable machine, where restrictive laws, biased enforcement, and hostile takeovers ensured that roughly 80% of Hungary’s traditional media was Fidesz-aligned. This meant a staggering 90% of state advertising revenue flowed into their coffers, effectively starving independent voices. Beyond media control, Orbán’s government had also enacted laws designed to silence or intimidate academic institutions and civil society organizations brave enough to shed light on his illiberal and kleptocratic tendencies. The question on everyone’s mind was: how did Magyar and Tisza manage to win a two-thirds majority in Parliament when the media was so heavily stacked against them? The answer, ironically, was as simple as it was profound: the internet. While Magyar had a powerful “ground game,” tirelessly visiting villages daily, the digital realm provided the essential oxygen for his burgeoning movement.
With traditional newspapers and broadcasters largely serving as Fidesz mouthpieces, Hungarian journalists, civil society groups, and opposition politicians pivoted to the internet. Small, agile online media outlets became beacons of independent reporting, bravely digging into government scandals. They skillfully leveraged social media to offer an alternative news diet to ordinary Hungarians, who were weary of being force-fed government propaganda. A pivotal moment, a real turning point, arrived on February 2, 2024. News outlet 444.hu broke a bombshell story: President Katalin Novák had pardoned an individual convicted of covering up child sex abuse at a state-run children’s foster home. Investigative powerhouses like Direkt36 and Telex.hu then dove deeper, exposing the shocking detail that a prominent religious leader and “spiritual mentor” to Orbán himself had played a significant role in securing this scandalous pardon. Despite the state media’s deafening silence or blatant downplaying, the story exploded online, sparking a massive wave of public protests. This “pardon affair” was too big to ignore; it ultimately forced Novák’s resignation, followed by the political exit of Judit Varga, who had been Minister of Justice when the pardon was granted. The people had spoken, and the internet had amplified their voices, demonstrating a profound shift in power dynamics.
This scandal became the dramatic stage entrance for Péter Magyar’s meteoric political career. On the very day Novák and Varga resigned, Magyar – a long-time Fidesz insider, political official, and crucially, Varga’s ex-husband – gave an explosive interview to Partizan, a YouTube channel known for its political discussions. In a move that sent shockwaves through Hungary, Magyar accused Fidesz of widespread corruption and of callously throwing Novák and Varga “under the bus” to protect the true culprits. The interview immediately went viral, quickly racking up a million views and eventually reaching an astonishing 2.8 million in a country of just 10 million people. The digital firestorm continued as Magyar subsequently posted on Facebook and YouTube secret recordings of Varga allegedly describing government interference in a corruption prosecution – these too went viral, further fueling public outrage. Seizing the momentum, in April, he launched Tisza as a new political party. Two years later, he delivered a crushing defeat to Orbán in a landslide election, a testament to the power of a popular movement, amplified by the internet.
Social media played an absolutely central role in Tisza’s election campaign. Despite being massively outspent by Fidesz – who poured over 85% of all political advertising money onto Meta platforms before a ban on political ads took effect, and then cleverly created mass private Facebook groups to bypass it – Tisza consistently outperformed Fidesz where it truly mattered: organic engagement. According to ResFutura, a Polish data analytics firm that tracked Facebook activity during the campaign, Tisza’s per-post engagement rate was roughly three times higher than Fidesz’s. This meant that Magyar’s content resonated far more effectively with actual audiences, even though Fidesz posted with far greater volume and resources. Tisza’s stunning triumph directly challenges a decade of “techno-pessimist” warnings that have argued the online ecosystem, with its alternative and social media, threatens democracy and necessitates more government regulation of speech and platforms. In fact, Hungary’s experience suggests the opposite: a steadfast commitment to free speech, both as a legal right and a cultural value, might just be a stronger antidote to creeping authoritarianism than any form of censorship.
Hungary itself stands as a powerful example. In the 2025 Future of Free Speech Index, a 33-country survey conducted by the Future of Free Speech think tank at Vanderbilt (where I am Executive Director), Hungary ranked an impressive third in popular support for free speech – trailing only Norway and Denmark, and even ahead of the United States. Yet, paradoxically, Hungarians also reported one of the sharpest declines in their actual ability to speak freely, surpassed only by Turks and Venezuelans. Sixteen years of Fidesz’s restrictions, rather than eroding the demand for free expression, had instead sharpened it. Tisza’s victory underscores a crucial truth often overlooked in liberal democracies, but one that is existential for authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin: controlling and censoring traditional media is a necessary, but ultimately insufficient, condition to entrench an authoritarian regime in the digital age. After the Arab Spring toppled dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, both Xi and Putin became obsessively focused on thwarting the disruptive influence and mobilizing potential of online dissent through systematic and pervasive online censorship. China expanded its “Great Firewall,” while Russia constructed its “Red Web,” implementing tight, real-time government control of online discourse and banning American tech platforms that Arab protestors had used to help topple their rulers. Both Xi and Putin would undoubtedly have viewed Orbán’s media capture and censorship as a half-measure with a fatal flaw, precisely because it left breathing room for independent news and organic mobilization via online and social media.
What the liberal democratic establishment sometimes gets right is that the internet and social media do tend to favor ideas and individuals who challenge prevailing narratives among elite institutions in politics, traditional media, and academia. In democracies governed by broadly centrist governments, this dynamic can create an opening for populists, often illiberal ones, to gain traction with narratives that resonate with large segments of the population but alarm elite opinion – think issues like immigration, globalization, and identity politics. This explains why politicians vulnerable to populist backlash – including Democrats in the United States and European figures like Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Ursula von der Leyen – are so invested in countering the perceived threat to democracy from online “disinformation” and the platforms that disseminate it. Disinformation spread by bad-faith actors who deliberately seek to overwhelm our ability to discern truth from lies is a genuine problem. However, efforts to curb it can often morph into suppressing uncomfortable dissent. In recent months alone, Merz has called for ending online anonymity, Macron has demanded new legislation to block false information online, while the EU administratively banned former Swiss army colonel Jacques Baud from entry and froze his assets for allegedly being “a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda” and advancing “conspiracy theories.” But dissent, though uncomfortable, is the fundamental price of governing in open democracies where political power derives from the consent of the governed, and where winning elections does not grant politicians the power to determine truth or silence disfavored viewpoints.
The establishment should find encouragement in Orbán’s defeat, as it demonstrates that even populists, once in power, are vulnerable to the backlash effects of online discontent. In America, many of the “contrarian” voices that fueled the MAGA “vibeshift” – from heterodox podcaster Joe Rogan to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson – have used their online platforms to criticize Trump. Similarly, progressive online voices like MeidasTouch and Brian Tyler Cohen have garnered massive followings among younger audiences whose news consumption skews heavily towards social media. None of this implies that liberal democracies can afford complacency about their information environment. Bad-faith actors – grifters, demagogues, and state-sponsored disinformation operations – exploit the openness of free societies precisely because they do not share liberal society’s commitment to truth. This was true in Ancient Athens when demagogues swayed the assembly to disaster, when Bismarck manipulated a telegram and a gullible press to engineer the Franco-Prussian War, and even when The New York Times’ Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for reporting that whitewashed the Holodomor, Stalin’s mass starvation in Ukraine. No mechanism will ever catch every lie, and covering harmful content will always be imperfect. But there are non-restrictive strategies that leverage, rather than restrict, free speech that democracies can implement to mitigate the harms of disinformation.
Taiwan, which endures more Chinese disinformation than any European democracy faces from Russia, has rejected the path of censorship. Its approach, pioneered by former Digital Minister Audrey Tang, is grounded in radical transparency and civic, crowdsourced rebuttal. Ordinary users flag suspected disinformation for real-time community debunking, rather than state censorship. This Taiwanese model has since been exported and inspired Twitter’s 2021 “Birdwatch” pilot, later renamed Community Notes under Elon Musk. This feature allows users to flag potentially misleading content, resulting in a visible Community Note if a critical mass of people with diverse political views rate it as helpful. This approach has already proven its value. When Trump administration officials attempted to reshape the narrative around the January 2026 killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Community Notes allowed the American people to fact-check their government in real-time, swiftly exposing the administration’s falsehoods and distortions. This isn’t just an isolated incident; peer-reviewed research has repeatedly demonstrated the potential of crowdsourced fact-checking for issues like COVID misinformation, political misinformation, and reducing the virality of false information. The mechanism strives for political neutrality, yet under Musk, X itself has undeniably taken a right turn. He uses the platform to support “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories, massively boosts his own views while selectively silencing opposing ones, all while branding himself a “free speech absolutist” – even as his actions contradict this claim. A 2025 study revealed that posts by Republicans are more than twice as likely to be flagged as misleading than posts by Democrats. The mechanism doesn’t work quite as well for Musk himself; he has been repeatedly community-noted on his own platform, which is a good thing. However, his dedicated fanbase often rallies to his defense, sometimes managing to get the note removed, as a Bloomberg investigation found. This demonstrates that the success of crowdsourcing ultimately depends on safeguards that prevent platform owners from manipulating the system.
So, for all its promise, crowdsourced fact-checking is not a flawless solution. It cannot cure every form of disinformation, propaganda, or conspiracy theory, and after-the-fact correction is just one tool for improving the online information ecosystem. As Tang, Glen Weyl, and I have argued, a more ambitious project involves redesigning social media itself around “prosocial” principles – highlighting content that builds bridges between communities rather than inflaming divisions, providing users with tools to see who is truly engaging with what they read, and making shared understanding, rather than outrage, the primary engine of engagement. As we contend: a prosocial media ecosystem will encourage regulatory frameworks that align with democratic values – openness, transparency, and free expression – rather than the current trajectory, where democracies find themselves on the defensive, resorting to measures long championed by closed societies to safeguard their systems of governance. The lesson from Budapest isn’t that the internet and social media are inherently good or will always lead to the triumph of democracy over authoritarianism. Instead, it highlights that subjecting them to government control is a necessary precondition for authoritarians to maintain power because these platforms provide a crucial outlet for citizens to circumvent official propaganda and censorship. Moreover, an overly critical tendency to characterize the online sphere as a toxic swamp irredeemably contaminated by lies and hatred ignores the immense potential of digital technology to improve our currently imperfect ecosystem of ideas and information. Free speech isn’t a luxury that democracies can ration when the information environment becomes uncomfortable. It is the fundamental precondition for the self-government those democracies claim to embody – the mechanism by which voters identify what their rulers are concealing, by which excluded constituencies signal the concerns that elite consensus has missed, and by which an insurgent movement, armed with a YouTube channel and a Facebook page, can humiliate a 16-year authoritarian incumbent. The task for establishment institutions is not to paternally manage the digital public sphere but to genuinely listen to what it is telling them. Democratic governments that respond by expanding their power to silence the messengers may well find, as Orbán did, that the messages keep arriving, that the audiences keep growing, and that at the ballot box, the voters remember who tried to shut them up.