By the way, can I ask something? Last December, when I visited Gracy and we were driving to the airport on a Sunday, I noticed how many churches there were, and how many believers. Is that a fair impression? In Switzerland and Germany I have not seen so many people in front of churches lately. Is Sunday mass still very much a tradition there?
Was it just an ordinary Sunday, no special holiday?
It was in December, during Advent.
I am not an expert on the sociology of religion, but yes, I think the percentage of people who declare themselves religious is quite high in international comparison. I also have a friend who works on religion and says there is some sort of religious revival.
That may also be connected to Covid and post-Covid developments, but I really would not want to go too far on that because it is not my field.
Coming back to interfaces, infrastructures, and digitalisation: what kinds of platforms, technologies, or tools have you used to engage politically?
Nothing beyond the regular social media, and by that I mostly mean Facebook, because I do not really use others. I have an Instagram account, but I do not use it. I used to have a Twitter account, but I never really tweeted, then it got hacked, and I never set it up again.
So really, nothing beyond that. And again, I am not much of an activist. I did sign petitions online, but that is not a very big deal.
Are there in-person spaces or informal networks that have been especially important for your political subjectivity?
I think I already talked about them. But yes, to go back a bit: the period I spent in Budapest doing my MA and PhD at CEU was a very important formative experience. I can only put it in general terms, but the community at the university was something very special and very good.
Then, after I returned home, there were a few people I worked closely with, my colleagues, perhaps even friends. That network has been very important to me too. It is not a big circle, maybe five to ten people at most.
Given the role of algorithms, AI, and misinformation in shaping how we receive political information, have you observed changes in how news and mobilisation work? You mentioned that one of your morning rituals is waking up and checking the news digitally.
You probably know about the cancelled Romanian presidential election in December 2024. And you know what happened there with TikTok. That was actually the moment when I first really checked what this TikTok thing was.
I looked at it together with a colleague for maybe ten minutes, and it was astonishing, in a negative sense. We were able to get the algorithm to calibrate very quickly. By simply swiping one way or the other, we gave it the impression that we were extreme-right voters. At first there was a mix of political and non-political content. Then, once it understood that we were looking more at the political content, it moved to the next step: deciding what kind of political actors we were interested in. It alternated between mainstream and extreme-right content, and then in the third stage it decided we really wanted the extreme-right material. In less than ten minutes, it was feeding us only that kind of content.
That was really shocking.
And on Facebook I also see these things. I think I have enough experience to recognise what is a real account, what is a bot, what is a fake account, or what is an account clearly linked to a party but disguised as an ordinary person. I can see it. But I no longer have the patience to read all of it. I have lost my analytical curiosity about how Fidesz communicates, for example. I already know too much about it. I do not have the time or the nerve for it. It is enough for me to scroll a little way down the feed.
Do you know the concept of a boundary object? It is the idea that something travels across contexts and takes on different meanings in different settings.
For example, I used the concept of human rights in my own research. In one context, human rights are an instrument for measuring equality. For a donor, they are part of standards and implementation. For NGOs, they can mean access to resources. For communities themselves, they can mean practical access to food or visibility. So I was wondering whether, in your work, you have also seen how ideas travel and change meaning, for example through algorithms, protests, or political communication.
I am still not sure whether I fully understand, but if you are asking whether I have seen cases where concepts are distorted and used for manipulation or disinformation, then yes.
A good example is the discourse on war and peace. This is not only a Hungarian issue, but I have Hungary in mind first. There is a so-called pro-peace narrative according to which only one political camp truly wants to prevent war, while the other is the pro-war camp. Sometimes the warning is about the country being attacked; sometimes it escalates into the idea of a full-blown world war or even nuclear war. The point is that one camp claims to be the only one defending peace. This happens in Romania too, in Hungary, and probably further west as well. I think this completely distorts the concepts.
Another example is sovereignty. The far right and extreme right often call themselves sovereignists. In theory that could mean they are strongly Eurosceptic and want powers returned from the EU to the national level. But beyond that, the concept does not really hold, because in practice they sometimes behave almost like agents of Russia, and in other cases they seem willing to do anything for approval from Trump. So if they really cared about sovereignty, they would not behave like that. The concept is being emptied and devalued.
And a third one is freedom of speech. This one is especially important to me. When I was a child, as I told you, I was literally told to be quiet because speaking could be dangerous. So freedom of speech matters enormously to me. But now these radical-right actors, together with their new allies, especially the tech giants in the US, though not only them, because TikTok also fits here, claim that they are the defenders of free speech. But under that label, what they actually want is to let everything loose on these platforms: hate speech, incitement, and all sorts of toxic content. And they call that freedom of speech.
So yes, that is actually a very good boundary object.
I am not sure the algorithm itself is the thing doing the conceptual transformation. The algorithm is more a tool that amplifies it. At the political level, the distortion is already there; the algorithm just strengthens it.
Thank you very much. I know I am taking a lot of your time, so just to wrap up: is there anything we have not covered that feels important for understanding your political life, or perhaps your apolitical life?
I do not know. That is why I told you earlier that perhaps I was speaking to you as if I were speaking to a psychologist. I hope you will forgive me for that. I am in this strange phase where maybe I will move away from all this, maybe I will switch paths. Because of that I am full of dilemmas, full of ambivalence, full of doubt.
I do not know how you will trace that analytically, or in what categories you will place it. But I am probably not the only person nowadays experiencing this kind of uncertainty. I think “doubt” is probably the right word.
No, I do not think there is anything else I need to add. It was already pretty personal. I do not know whether this is what you wanted it to be.
No, that is totally fine. Thank you very much. That was really good.