Despite ban, Fidesz still freely advertises on Facebook via its Digital Civic Circles

Fidesz' Digital Civic Circles (Digitális Polgári Körök or DPKs) are running more than 200 ads on Facebook, according to a brief analysis by Political Capital shared on Facebook. Fidesz is thus continuing its campaign to recruit and increase its voter database even after the official ban on political advertising has taken effect.

According to Political Capital, by Tuesday morning, the DPKs had run 260 ads encouraging Internet users to join, but, some of these ads expired at noon on October 28. However, in the afternoon, they launched a new wave, with 230 ads running simultaneously.

They make no secret of the fact that this is a political movement: the shared images feature Fidesz influencers and opinion leaders (many of the images were taken at a campaign event, the so-called Peace March), but there is also one showing Minister of Defence Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky.

According to the policy research institute, the goal of the campaign is not only to expand DPK membership, as they also encourage target audiences to provide offline data: they ask for email addresses, full names, cities and zip codes, and phone numbers. According to Political Capital, this is how Fidesz wants to improve the database which constitutes the basis of its mobilisation system. In connection with this, at the recent training camp of the “Fight Club”, Viktor Orbán said that things are not going too well, so everyone should help "Commander Kubatov" (Gábor Kubatov, the director of Fidesz).

Although Google and Meta have in principle banned political advertising in the EU, it seems that so far this has only been partially successful. At Google, for example, ads are classified as political, and, therefore, prohibited, on a self-declaration basis, and Meta's system is also struggling with Hungarian ads, as the National Resistance Movement has also advertised several AI-generated Minecraft-themed videos featuring Péter Magyar before Tuesday. What's more, after the ban, in mid-October, they even released an animated educational story about why it's not a good idea to move to the banks of the Tisza River.

We have previously reported about the numerous Digital Civic Circles ads which slipped through the filter because Facebook somehow failed to notice that the groups created as campaign tools for Fidesz were politically motivated, and therefore allowed them to recruit members in posts which were given a financial push.