The AI war videos targeted residents of the electoral district where the current Justice Minister is running for re-election.

Abandoned wives and children, murdered soldiers, and other horrors of war appear in the videos of the Facebook page called Not our war (Nem a mi háborúnk). Political Capital was the first to notice in February that a proxy campaign was happening in the electoral district of Justice Minister Bence Tuzson, with visual elements reinforcing Fidesz's anti-war messages, and also violating Meta's ban on political advertising.

The videos

The Facebook page Not our war has published a total of 15 videos by February 20, but since three videos were posted twice, this only covers 12 different pieces of content. The first video was uploaded on January 3.

The page, categorized as news and media service, has only 338 followers, and the posts do not receive much reaction: on average, 250 people liked the reels videos. However, their content is more successful in terms of views: one video has been played 151,000 times, and three other videos have exceeded 100,000 views. The 15 videos have been played a total of 793,500 times until February 20.

The basic concept of the videos is that a Hungarian soldier dies or is wounded on the front lines, in most cases leaving behind a loved one. All of the videos are accompanied by sad or dramatic music, and at the end of each reels, the caption "Not our war" appears.

The page posted two AI videos (1, 2) about the same story: first, we see a wedding, then the image switches from the ring being put on to the husband to him activating a hand grenade on the front lines and dying in the explosion. At the end of the video, we see the grieving widow in the same church where the couple had their wedding.

In another video, which was also posted twice (1, 2), a pregnant woman accompanied by her partner is undergoing a medical check-up while war scenes are shown on TV. Then soldiers take the frightened man to the front, where he dies, and at the end of the video, the woman stands at the man's grave with the baby in her arms.

Another video shows a boy graduating from school, who is then drafted into the army, killed in a drone attack, and is finally shown at his funeral, where there are white roses on his grave, just like the ones he received at his graduation.

Clear political message

The videos and descriptions do not directly contain any reference to political parties, nor there is any specific reference to Hungarian soldiers being sent to the Russian-Ukrainian war.

On January 18, Fidesz Budapest posted an AI video on Facebook in which a little girl asks her mother when her father will come home. The mother says in a trembling voice, with tears in her eyes, that he will be home soon. Then we see the father blindfolded at the frontline, being shot in the head. At the end, the narrator says that we should not let others decide our families' fate, announces the date of the election, and adds:

“War takes everything away. Let's not take any risks! Fidesz is the safe choice.”

In one of the February reels videos of Not our war, we see a family whose two male members are being conscripted. They stand blindfolded at the frontline and are shot in the head, similar to the scene depicted in the Fidesz video.

The theme of mourning children also reappears; in two videos from Not our war, we see a child mourning his/her father.

At the end of a more recent video about a disabled soldier returning from the front, Not our war uses the same slogan (“War takes everything away. Let's not take any risks!") which was used in Fidesz's AI video.

The name "Not our war" may also be familiar: Fidelitas has a campaign opposing mandatory conscription that uses this as its slogan.

The petition by Fidesz's youth organization was launched on October 13. A video of Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi, a politician from the Tisza Party, was embedded on the campaign website. The video shows him saying:

"Conscription should be reinstated."

However, the clip was edited in a misleading way: the first half of the sentence was cut out, thus altering the meaning of the statement. In fact, Ruszin-Szendi said that there is currently no need for conscription.

Advertisements

Meta's ad library shows that 13 videos (all but two of the 15 videos) were advertised on Facebook in a total of 132 ads.

One of the wedding theme videos had the highest reach, viewed by 77,000 users through ads.

Meta removed only 18 of the 132 ads, not because they violated the political advertising ban, but because they were deemed too violent. There were a few ads for which all versions were removed, so we can’t say for sure which video was being advertised. This is why there is an "unknown" row in our graph.

Connection to Tuzson

Some of the advertisements (39) were targeted at the whole country,

The Pest county 05 electoral district consists of these five municipalities. In the 2022 parliamentary elections, Fidesz representative Bence Tuzson won the district with 46 percent of the votes. In 2026, Tuzson, who has since been appointed Minister of Justice, will run again as a Fidesz candidate.

The Not our war page has no official ties to either Bence Tuzson or Fidesz.

Meta does not allow us to browse through all followers of the page when we open the followers tab, but two people's names are public: István Mohácsy and Marianna Márky.

István Mohácsy is the president of Fidelitas, the youth organization of Fidesz, and a Fidesz municipal representative in Biatorbágy. Mohácsy has been promoting the Fidelitas campaign "Not our war" on his Facebook page since its launch in October. On February 20, he posted that he was handing out flyers and setting up a stand with the slogan "Not our war" in Békéscsaba.

"We are traveling around the country to meet and talk to you. To amplify your voices and say together: this is not our war!"

- he wrote in his post.

Marianna Márky ran for Fidesz in the last local elections in Erdőkertes. Although she did not win a seat on the municipal council, she did win a seat on the county council.

In addition to following the page, Márky wrote three comments under the first video of Not our war, one from her official Facebook page and two from her private profile, and also shared the video.

Márky regularly shares Bence Tuzson's posts and helps him in his campaign based on the politician's Facebook activity. In October, for example, Tuzson posted about Márky collecting signatures "against war plans" in Csömör. They have posted several other posts about their joint work in the past.

(Cover illustration: Annamari Dezső)