PolSci hivemind: Especially if you work on Hungary. What is the best way to retrieve official campaign communication of both Fidesz and TISZA in the weeks before the election?

Reminds me on dynamics in Germany.

Let's ask Musk's AI system.

That sounds very interesting... I have to make sure to apply for next year.

We already speculated about this authoritarian and often absurd propaganda in Trump's political communication strategy during the BLM protests in 2021: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... — sad to see that many of our speculations in the conclusion actually materialized.

We had the same idea but our results are pretty much in line (49% TISZA, and even 25% Fidesz–KDNP, and 7% for Mi Hazank). PS: This is from a non-probability online sample with quotas with no weighting so far)

Classic attribution problems here :D

But let's see whether bsky.app/profile/palm... is correct.

Polling stations are now closed in Hungary. I am really excited for Hungary and Europe. @draege.bsky.social and I asked 1157 Hungarians last week who they think will win. Their prediction: 50% said TISZA, but also 20% did not know. It's going to be a close one.

Voting in Hungary is underway. Opposition leader Péter Magyar, leading in polls, has cast his vote. Turnout at 7am is 3.46%—a record, twice as high as 4 years ago. Early data shows opposition areas overperforming, while Fidesz strongholds are lagging.

Follow me for updates on the #HungaryElection

PS: And read the introduction section of my PhD thesis for why we shouldn’t rely purely on media based data for systematic analyses of cyberattacks.

Would be interesting to see whether these respondents generally rely on chatbots for general advice (e.g., on finance, health, life decisions).

In an effort to promote open data, I just uploaded my media-based data collection on political DDoS attacks from 2008-2016 with manual coding of attacker types, targets, and attribution certainty. Feel free to explore the early days of Anonymous and Russian hacktivists: osf.io/preprints/so...

That's a very cool idea and implementation. I am gone use your approach for future projects. When are where can I find the complete upcoming issue?

‘Bullshit’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless - Simon Walo, 2023 Recent studies show that many workers consider their jobs socially useless. Thus, several explanations for this phenomenon have been proposed. David Graeber’s ‘...

Great title: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Authoritarian Persuasion at Home and Abroad: The Partial Effectiveness of Foreign Influencers in Propaganda Work - Siyu Liang, Lachlan McNamee, 2026 How do authoritarian regimes make propaganda persuasive? This study evaluates the impact of foreign influencers in propaganda. Social media videos and state bro...

This is such a cool and timely study on new forms of digital propaganda: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Social media users experience more political hostility in less economically equal and less democratic societies - Nature Human Behaviour Drawing on survey data from 30 countries, Bor et al. find that online political hostility is higher in more unequal and less democratic societies.

🚨 New in Nature Human Behaviour: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Many prior accounts of social media hostility focus on algorithms. With @boralexander.bsky.social, @a-marie-sci.bsky.social & @leapradella.bsky.social, we use data from 30 countries to focus on the role of societal conditions.

🧵1/7

Great research!

If a teen is interested in losing weight, chances are they may turn to artificial intelligence platforms to get advice.

The AI advice they get may be to keep their calories and nutrients drastically below their daily needs, according to a new study by Frontiers in Nutrition. https://cnn.it/41clD52

Didn't the Terminator movies start like this?

Did it work?

Orbán’s Ceaușescu moment. Booed at his own rally, ranting and pointing fingers. His final message: Ukraine hatred.

I found this super helpful:https://m-graham.com/resources/conjoint%20how-to.pdf

I thank my co-authors for this great collaboration, the many colleagues that commented, i.a., @argohdes.bsky.social @hannefjelde.bsky.social , and the editor and reviewers of the @ejprjournal.bsky.social
Paper: doi.org/10.1017/S147...
Replication data & PAP: osf.io/bv8sm/files/

(7/8) Notably, the deterrent effect on opponents weakened considerably during the 2023 campaign, when mobilization was already high and alternative narratives more accessible.

(6/8) Do these emotional responses translate into behavior? We find some evidence that propaganda deters opponents from anti-government protest and encourages pro-government engagement among supporters — but these behavioral results are more mixed and heterogeneous.

(5/8) Opponents exposed to propaganda videos report heightened anger and anxiety. Supporters report a stronger sense of societal belonging. These are consistent, robust findings across both experiments and both videos we tested.

(4/8) Our key contribution: propaganda rarely serves one purpose, and it does not affect everyone the same way. We separate between government supporters and opponents — an issue underexplored in earlier work, which largely focuses on closed autocracies like China.

(3/8) Turkey is a strong test case: deeply polarized, with real but unfair elections, and an AKP government that has made propaganda central to its political strategy. We ran two preregistered survey experiments: one in late 2022, one during the hotly contested 2023 presidential campaign.

(2/8) Why does this matter? Propaganda is a key tool for authoritarian regimes worldwide to deter opposition. Yet we know surprisingly little about how it works, on whom and when in electoral authoritarian regimes: regimes that hold elections but manipulate the playing field. We try to unpack this.