Visegrád 24 is a right-wing Polish online news service that publishes in English. It claims to collect and deliver news, political topics, current events, history and culture about. From 2022, the service is mostly focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the 2023 Israel-Hamas war. The service was established as a Twitter account in January 2020.^[1] As of November 2023, the service had over 800,000 followers on Twitter,^[2] 24,000 followers on Facebook^[3] and 20,000 followers on Instagram.^[4] It also has accounts on Telegram and YouTube.

Visegrád 24 does not produce new news content, but its content is based on sharing and republishing previously published information. It used to have a website which had no news content but offered the possibility of donation.^[5] It is unclear who founded this account or who runs it.^[1][6]

Credibility

Visegrád 24 has published fake news: it has claimed, among other things, that Leonardo DiCaprio donated 10 million dollars to Ukraine and that Pornhub blocked access to its site from Russia.^[1] Visegrád 24 often does not disclose its sources and has published years-old photos as new and used misleading illustrations. With the war in Ukraine, Visegrád 24 has become popular and has been referenced by most of the Polish and international media, including CNBC , Daily Express , Euractiv and The Times of Israel.^[6] According to Minna Ålander, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Institute, Visegrád 24 is not a credible news source. Ålander considered the funding of the service murky, the line between truth and lies in the service's publications blurred, and considered Visegrád 24 to represent a "very unconstructive anti-French and anti-German agenda". According to Ålander, Visegrád 24 is or at least was close to Viktor Orbán.^[7]

Researchers from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Tartu listed Visegrád 24 in their list of reliable sources of information related to the war in Ukraine compiled in March 2022.^[8]

Publication of Finnish PM speech

Visegrád 24 was the first foreign social media account to publish a video of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin's "party speech" in August 2022.^[1] The OKO Press article, which investigated the activities of Visegrád 24, considered the role of the first publisher of Visegrád 24 at a time when Marin was prime minister Finnish NATO noteworthy - during the membership application. OKO Press' article considered the publication of the "defamation video" as a typical modus operandi of the Russian intelligence service. The video received about 10 million views on Visegrád 24's account.^[6]

History

A few months after Visegrád 24 was founded, Slovenian political scientist Mario Plesej asked the service who ran it, and Visegrád 24 replied that it was run by a group of mostly conservative friends, many of whom worked in the news industry and were interested in the Visegrád Group and the Three Seas Initiative.^[1] In the fall of 2022, the Polish news sites TrueStory and OKO Press found out who was behind Visegrád 24. According to the investigation, at least Adam Starzyński and Stefan Tompson would be behind the account.^[1]

Polish journalist Adam Starzyński has worked for the English-language service of the right-wing Polish television channel TV Republika . Starzyński is also known to have moderated the very conservative Twitter account BasedPoland, which had 150,000 followers before Twitter removed the account. Starzyński is a key figure in the MEGA (Make Europe Great Again) movement, an informal movement similar to Donald Trump's Make America Great Again campaign that aims to spread xenophobia and populist views. The BasedPoland account was known for its anti-refugee content and praise of right-wing political leaders, including the Polish government, Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orbán. Starzyński supports Ukraine and the European far-right under the name Adam Starski on social media.^[1] Starzyński has been working for the State of Poland Foundation since March 2020.^[6]

Stefan Tompson, a British communications expert, has been working in Poland since 2014 and as of 2020 maintains an English-language YouTube channel on the history of Poland.^[9] Thompson also has connections with the MEGA movement. He has received funding from the Polish Film Foundation and his videos have been published on the Visegrád 24 account. In an interview with Rzeczpospolita in September 2022, Tompson said that he created the Visegrád 24 accounts and maintains them together with his friends who work in the social media industry. He denied the claim that the "party noise" video featuring Marini was first published on Visegrád 24. He also found the Prime Minister's celebration in a geopolitically tense time questionable and stated that he believed that many people supported Finland's NATO membership application only because "Sanna Marin is a beautiful woman". According to Tompson, liberal views are overrepresented in social media compared to conservative views. He condemned Viktor Orbán's pro-Russian view of the war in Ukraine, but emphasized that Orbán's view of the West's identity crisis is correct and that spreading that view was not advancing Russia's interests.^[1] Tompson works for the Polish broadcaster Telewizja Polska.^[6]

TrueStory has pointed that the founder of Visegrád 24 would be Wojciech Pawelczyk, who is a partner of the conservative American journalist Jack Posobiec.^[6]

Relationship with Polish government and right-wing elements

Visegrád 24's TikTok and Instagram accounts praise Polish government politicians and spread their statements. Visegrád 24's Twitter account was brought up by Polish right-wing conservative politicians before it became popular.^[1] According to the report by OKO Press, Visegrád 24 has close relations with the Polish foreign administration.^[6]

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk said in 2021 that Visegrád 24 is not the official account of the Visegrád Group or the Polish Presidency of the Visegrád Group, but that the Polish administration appreciates the work it does to inform the activities of the Visegrád Group. Polish diplomats and the English account of the Polish Prime Minister's Office have frequently mentioned and tagged the Visegrád 24 account in their posts, especially during the 2020–2021 Polish Presidency of the Visegrád Group. Visegrád 24 was popular with Polish right-wing politicians even before it established its position and became popular with the Ukrainian war. Hungarian Ambassador Eduard Habsburg also tagged Visegrád 24 in his publications in 2021. Most often Visegrád 24 was tagged in his publications by Beata Daszyńska-Muzyczka, head of the Polish State National Development Bank, at a time when the bank was establishing the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund. Daszyńska-Muzyczka is the chairman of the fund's supervisory board, a member of the Polish Foreign Affairs Research Unit and a board member of the State of Poland Foundation. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied any connection to Visegrád 24.^[6]

Funding

Stefan Tompson, one of the founders and administrators of Visegrád 24, said in September 2022 that Visegrád 24 had been operating without any funding, but that it was going to look for investors to function properly as a news service.^[1]

On October 31, 2022, the Polish Prime Minister's Office awarded 1.4 million zlotys (about €300,000) to the leisure and health promotion foundation Actionlife for a project called Visegrád 24. The decision was signed by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki . The Polish news service Wirtualna Polska asked the Chancellery for more information about the Visegrád 24 project, to which the Chancellery replied that the aim is to establish an English-language website dealing with the culture, history and politics of the East Central Europe and Three Seas Initiative regions, as well as countering Russian disinformation . The purpose of the Visegrád 24 project financed by the Prime Minister's Office was therefore the same as what the Visegrád 24 news service announced it was doing. However, a representative of the Actionlife Foundation replied to Wirtualna Polska that the grant had been canceled and refused to answer whether the funds were intended to be used to develop the existing Visegrád 24 service. Stefan Tompson did not answer Wirtualna Polska's question whether the Polish state had become a financier of Visegrád 24.^[1][10]

References