Steven N.
Eagle eyes at Telex noticed that since March 2020, dozens of articles have been stolen and published on the website of the Justice Ministry’s Digital Freedom Working Group, also called the Digital Freedom Committee.
Articles were taken from both Hungarian as well as the international press, with domestic articles swiped from HVG, Index, as well as Telex itself, among other sources, while international stories typically came from Politico.
The Ministry of Justice’s working group compiled articles that indicate, for example, how Facebook and Twitter restrict their users’ “freedom of speech, how they exploit them, and how they silence Christian-conservative thinkers.”
However, one of the main objectives of the Digital Freedom Working Group is also to protect copyright.
The articles in the “news” section of the Ministry of Justice’s website taken from other sources were published in whole without changes or attribution. The author and a link to its source often did appear at the end of the article, but Telex noted that to the superficial reader, it might appear that the reporter had written the story for the government site, which was then covered by their own news outlet.
Telex also notes that while the government regularly refers to these very press outfits as fake news sources, they still secretly swipe many articles that are published in them.
Shortly after Telex’s story came out, the articles in question disappeared from the Digital Freedom Committee’s website, but Telex had previously archived some of them, which can be viewed on their site.
