If you have come across messages such as “what Europe needs is a peaceful continent” on Facebook or X, you may have encountered coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB).
CIB is a manipulative communication tactic that uses a combination of authentic, fake and duplicated social media accounts to operate as an adversarial network across platforms such as X, Facebook or Bluesky.
By coordinating their activity, these accounts can amplify particular messages and create an online impression that may not reflect the reality of public opinion.
The tactic spread massively during Covid.
In a paper entitled ‘Coordinated inauthentic behavior: An innovative manipulation tactic to amplify Covid-19 anti-vaccine communication outreach via social media’, Monica Murero wrote that such operations could be “one of the greatest threats to freedom of expression and democracy in our society”.
But this distortion becomes particularly visible during elections.
Indeed, with political momentum, spreading messages and content online can influence how voters perceive the strength of an incumbent government and the prospects of its opposition.
Manufacturing political dominance
The latest example is Serbia.
Ahead of parliamentary elections in Serbia, the Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI), in collaboration with Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, investigated how coordinated networks promoted former Serbian PM and president Aleksandar Vučić while undermining independent media.
“CIB corrupts the public signal that democracies rely on to understand themselves,” head of research at BFMI Vanesa Valcheva told EUobserver.
The findings point to a broader problem for democratic debate: online visibility can be manipulated to sustain an image of political dominance, even when the picture on the ground appears different.
“Incumbents often try to look unbeatable to discourage opposition voters, reassure their supporters, and show outside partners that things are unlikely to change,” Valcheva said.
Before the rise of these coordinated online operations, the digital space offered dissent more room to breathe.
But nowadays, CIB networks can undermine the online space by repeatedly circulating messages that support a particular political interest and make it appear more widely shared than it is.
And indeed, Vučić dominated the space on X and Facebook while the streets suggested otherwise.
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More than a year ago, we launched our Hungary Briefing series, a weekly roundup of news from Hungary’s election campaign. The series continues, covering developments following the historic election and the actions of the Tisza government. This week’s topics:
The great Covid scam.
Former minister kept €25m in cash at home.
Closer ties with the Czech Republic.
Mixed results for the revolution’s anniversary commemorations.
Poll of the week: Tisza supporters lean liberal.
The Covid scam
Shortly after the Covid pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020, the Orbán government purchased almost 17,000 ventilators for 300 billion forints, equivalent to €860m at the exchange rate at the time.
The machines were imported from China through various foreign intermediary companies. Viktor Orbán later said he had consulted mathematicians about how many ventilators Hungarian hospitals would need under the worst-case scenarios.
They did not save lives
Yet most of these machines never reached hospitals — and even if they had, they would not have been able to save lives. György Velkey, a state secretary in the Tisza government, wrote on Facebook, citing a 2020 military medical report, that only around half the machines had been classified as usable. The remaining half were either recommended for hospital use “only with serious compromises” or not recommended at all.
Many of the machines are still gathering dust in warehouses.
In 2023, former opposition MP Tímea Szabó showed what 12,000 unopened ventilators looked like in a warehouse in Gödöllő. The Hungarian state was paying 80 million forints, or approximately €200,000, a month just to store them.
The middlemen cashed in
And that is not all: the companies contracted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, headed by Péter Szijjártó, made a fortune from procuring the machines. Further details emerged after a raid on Tuesday(27 Ocober) by the National Tax and Customs Administration (NAV).
NAV detained three people, while an international arrest warrant was issued for the suspected leader of the criminal organisation. He is believed to be in Indonesia — and the news outlet 444 discovered that he operates a Ferris wheel in Bali.
“Acting as part of a criminal organisation, the perpetrators who sold ventilators and medical masks to state bodies during the Covid-19 pandemic laundered more than three billion forints [approximately €7.5m] in profits, then deprived the state treasury of 660 million forints [approximately €1.7m] by evading tax,” NAV said.
Footage recorded during the raid also reveals the luxury in which the suspects lived. As 444 notes, this may be only part of the story: other companies may also have been involved in the overpriced procurement deals. There is no word yet on whether the authorities are investigating any responsibility Szijjártó or Orbán may bear in the case.
Presented as a success story
The Orbán government tried to portray its pandemic response as a success story. In early 2025, it released a short film entitled How We Defeated the Covid Pandemic.
Almost 49,000 people died in the pandemic in Hungary. According to international statistics, the country had the world’s fifth-highest death toll per million inhabitants.
Former minister kept €25m in cash
Hungarian authorities accuse Miklós Seszták, who served as development minister in the Orbán government between 2014 and 2018 and was re-elected to parliament this year, of accepting at least 11 billion forints, or approximately €27.5m, in bribes. On Wednesday (28 October), a court extended his pre-trial detention until the end of January.
Its ruling revealed an important detail in the corruption case.
During a search of Seszták’s home, investigators found an empty safe in which, according to the court, he had kept nine billion forints in cash — approximately €25m at the current exchange rate. He had arranged for the money to be hidden before he was questioned.
As 444 calculated, that amount of cash would be extremely heavy: 450,000 banknotes with a face value of 20,000 forints could weigh 450kg.
They did not know where to put the cash
Commenting on the news, investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi wrote that “in principle, this is entirely consistent with what several colleagues and I have long been hearing from sources with inside knowledge of the NER” — the political and economic system built around Orbán.
According to Panyi, as early as the 2010s, one of the major problems facing people within the Orbán regime was how to store the vast amounts of cash generated by corruption. They could not deposit it in a bank without having to explain where it came from.
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The Russian army was killing city residents on Thursday morning.
Russia claims to have captured Dobropillia. Ukraine says its attack on the town failed.
The ceasefire in Oleshky is being observed, but preparations for further fighting are under way during it.
Maps of the day — Oleshky, Dobropillia
Videos of the day — the destroyed centre of Kherson; Kramatorsk prepares for street fighting; did one surface-to-air missile hit two Russian missiles?; an impressive shootdown of a jet-powered Geran by an F-16
The Russian army was killing city residents on Thursday morning. First, a warning to all readers: this latest edition of the Ukraine Battlefield update contains several videos and photographs of victims of Russian attacks that may be distressing. Consider whether you wish to continue reading today.
We do not usually publish such footage, but so much of it emerged within just a few hours today that we are publishing it to explain why, during October, Russia killed more Ukrainian civilians than at any time since the battle for Mariupol.
Ukrainian cities in the rear are currently suffering more than at any point since the start of the war. This is partly because the United States has stopped supplying missiles for Patriot systems — which Europe pays for anyway — and partly because of the mass deployment of jet-powered drones.
Shooting them down is more complicated, and the air defence success rate has therefore fallen. Russia is also attacking populated areas, which inevitably increases the civilian death toll.
Thursday morning was particularly tragic. Russian weapons killed people in Dnipro, Kremenchuk, and Chernihiv. In every case, the victims were ordinary residents, including children in several cases.
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On Sunday (1 November) Bulgarians vote in a presidential runoff. The question that will outlast the result is not who wins, but whether the winner is willing to say no to prime minister Rumen Radev.
Radev spent nine years as president with Iliana Yotova as his vice-president.
He resigned in January to enter party politics and the office passed to her automatically; she has never been elected to it.
In April his Progressive Bulgaria coalition won 131 of parliament’s 240 seats, and it now backs her for a full term.
In the first round she led Andrey Gyurov, a former caretaker prime minister backed by the pro-Western opposition, by fewer than three points. Turnout was 22 percent – the lowest on record.
The presidency’s power to say no
An elected majority is legitimate; so is cooperation between government and president. The constitutional risk begins where cooperation becomes an expectation of loyalty. An institution can keep every legal power and still lose the will to use it against political allies.
In Bulgaria those powers are modest but real.
A president can send a law back, and parliament must debate and vote on it again in public. Radev’s majority can pass it a second time with 121 votes, but the second vote is on the record.
A president can also refer a law to the Constitutional Court, commands the armed forces, and chairs the Consultative Council on National Security, where the state assesses threats to itself.
None of this can stop a determined majority. All of it can force one to explain itself.
Both governments suspect Russian involvement, although responsibility has not been conclusively established; more than two dozen sailors are dead or missing.
The first strike in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone came on 6 October. By then Yotova had been president for nine months without once convening the security council. She convened it the next day, after the opposition demanded it in public.
Yotova knows how to use a veto: in February she returned an Electoral Code amendment that limited the number of polling stations in countries outside the EU, calling it unconstitutional.
That parliament was not Radev’s. Against his majority the test came in July, with the 2026 budget. The reformist and conservative opposition, the Podkrepa trade union and a petition with more than 32,000 signatures asked her to return it. Y
Yotova argued that a veto would deepen financial uncertainty and promulgated the budget. On 20 October, the Constitutional Court upheld the budget as a whole but struck down two provisions inserted through it. The challenge came from MPs and the ombudsman, not the presidency.
Nato dispute
One policy dispute between the candidates concerns Article 4 of the Nato treaty. Gyurov wants Bulgaria to request consultations with its allies. Yotova initially opposed invoking it, but later acknowledged that coordinated action with other allies remained an option.
Radev ruled it out on the day of the first attack because the ships were struck outside Bulgarian territorial waters. Yet Article 4 does not require an attack on national territory; it applies whenever an ally considers its security threatened. Whether to invoke it is a political choice. Territorial eligibility is not the obstacle.
The test of an independent presidency is not whether it agrees with the government on Article 4. It is whether it would demand a public account of what the state knew, what it did and what went wrong, and publish it even when it embarrasses the people who put it in office.
The European Commission’s rule-of-law report in July noted that most of Bulgaria’s regulators had their mandates renewed without becoming any more independent. A renewed mandate is not proof of oversight. Neither is a convened council.
The same test applies to Gyurov, an independent nominated by the reformist parties We Continue the Change and Democratic Bulgaria, who told CNN on 23 October that Bulgaria needs a counterweight to its government. A counterweight that only ever pushes against Radev is a faction, not an institution. A president elected by the opposition would have to challenge the opposition too.
Both are entitled to a clear account of what Bulgaria saw, when it acted and what failed.
Brussels, for its part, should judge institutional independence not by formal procedures, but by whether those institutions are willing to challenge those in power. The question to ask is simpler: when did it last contradict the government?
Radev has a mandate to govern. The next president will hold a separate one: to question, to return, to refer and, when necessary, to refuse.
Europe does not need a Bulgaria that pretends it never makes mistakes. It needs one that can find and correct them before its sailors, its neighbours and its allies pay for them.
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