On the Frontlines of Truth: What Central and Eastern Europe’s Fact-Checkers Learned from a Gauntlet of High-Stakes Elections

By [Author Name]

Over the past half-decade, Central and Eastern Europe has transformed into one of the world’s most volatile geopolitical testing grounds. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, citizens have gone to the polls in a relentless cycle of voting. Bulgaria weathered an unprecedented eight general elections between 2021 and 2026. The Czech Republic introduced postal voting for the first time amid fierce public debate. Romania and Moldova managed complex, multi-tiered elections involving presidential, parliamentary, and local offices. Meanwhile, Hungary recently concluded what many analysts regard as its most consequential and fiercely contested electoral showdown in two decades.

In this region, election campaigns are rarely simple contests of political policy. Instead, they operate as heavily contested information battlefields defined by domestic political polarization, deep-seated societal distrust, and aggressive foreign interference. At the center of this turbulence stand fact-checkers—independent journalists and watchdogs working tirelessly to expose false narratives and supply audiences with accurate, verified information.

What lessons have these professionals learned from debunking a relentless stream of falsehoods before exhausted electorates head to the ballot box? And how can their hard-won battlefield experiences serve colleagues facing similar democratic strains in other regions of the world? To answer these questions, this report draws on extensive conversations with five prominent fact-checking organizations operating across Central and Eastern Europe: Factual (Romania), Factcheck.bg (Bulgaria), Demagog (Czech Republic), Stop Fals (Moldova), and Lakmusz (Hungary).

1. Chronology of a Regional Storm: A Decade of Electoral Turmoil

To understand the current state of disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe, one must examine the dense timeline of democratic stress the region has experienced since the dawn of the 2020s.

• 2021–2026 (Bulgaria): Bulgaria entered a paralyzing political loop, forcing citizens to the polls for eight general elections in five years. This institutional fatigue created fertile ground for domestic political volatility and pro-Russian sentiment, ultimately culminating in the rise of pro-Russian candidate Rumen Radev to the premiership.
• 2024 (Romania & Moldova): Romania experienced a chaotic mega-election year encompassing local, parliamentary, European Union, and presidential contests. The initial round of the presidential election saw far-right outsider Călin Georgescu secure a shock victory, fueled by viral TikTok networks and clandestine funding. Following intelligence reports confirming illicit foreign influence, Romania’s constitutional authorities took the historic step of annulling the election. In neighboring Moldova, citizens navigated fierce presidential and parliamentary battles under the immediate shadow of Kremlin-backed hybrid warfare.
• 2025 (Romania Redux & Czech Republic): In May 2025, Romanian voters returned to the polls for a do-over presidential election, electing liberal Nicușor Dan, the former mayor of Bucharest. Simultaneously, the Czech Republic instituted structural electoral reforms, introducing postal voting for the first time. The reform faced intense public skepticism and a wave of pre-election disinformation as former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš mounted a major political comeback. Furthermore, October 2025 marked a pivotal regulatory turning point in the European Union as a sweeping ban on paid political, electoral, and social-issue advertising took effect across all member states.
• 2026 (Hungary): Hungary held what international observers termed its most crucial election in twenty years, as opposition challenger Péter Magyar challenged the entrenched illiberal governance system of long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The campaign was characterized by sophisticated domestic fearmongering campaigns and targeted foreign disinformation operations.

2. Main Facts and Lessons Learned: Five Takeaways from the Frontlines

The conversations with regional editors and fact-checkers yield five foundational takeaways for navigating high-stakes democratic elections under threat.

Think of the Unthinkable and Prepare Explainers

One of the most recurring regrets among fact-checkers is a failure of imagination regarding which political actors or narratives will capture public attention. Horatiu Bontea of Romania’s Factual—an initiative launched by watchdog NGO Funky Citizens in 2014—admits his team made a critical miscalculation ahead of the 2024 presidential race.

“Georgescu seemed quite random and not so popular. We assumed that not a lot of people would vote for him and that we didn’t have to bother fact-checking him. We were wrong,” Bontea reflected.

Georgescu’s subsequent victory in the first round (and the ensuing constitutional crisis that saw the election annulled due to hidden TikTok networks and secret financial backing) caught watchdogs flat-footed.

Similar normalization challenges emerged elsewhere. In Bulgaria, Factcheck.bg journalist Vassilena Dotkova noted that her team had to rapidly adapt their editorial policies to address AI-generated satirical imagery. While traditional fact-checking guidelines typically exclude satire, these synthetic images were routinely consumed and shared as authentic documentation of reality.

In Hungary, Lakmusz faced identical dilemmas regarding synthetic visual media. Rather than ignoring them, the organization chose to analyze AI-generated media as a broader societal phenomenon in the public interest. They adopted a "pre-bunking" strategy, publishing detailed explainers on structural electoral mechanics—such as postal voting procedures and the methodology of opinion polls—long before those topics could be weaponized by bad actors.

This proactive philosophy is echoed in Prague. Jan Fridrichovský, editor-in-chief of the Czech fact-checking site Demagog, emphasized the value of anticipation. When the Czech Republic introduced postal voting in 2025, Demagog anticipated a surge of manipulated claims targeting the new system and published preemptive educational content to stay ahead of the curve.

Experiment with New Formats and Partner with Trusted Voices

Traditional long-form debunks, while rigorous, often fail to reach younger demographics or citizens outside urban centers. Consequently, Central and Eastern European fact-checkers used recent election cycles as laboratories for innovative communication formats.

Factual in Romania pioneered real-time fact-checking during high-stakes television debates. Partnering journalists, editors, and external subject-matter experts, the team managed to debunk live political claims within an hour of utterance. Furthermore, Factual forged alliances with popular Gen Z influencers, producing short vertical video content and engaging Instagram carousels that integrated permanently into their workflow.

Similarly, Hungary’s Lakmusz began producing one-minute video summaries of key investigations, which rapidly outpaced traditional written articles in reach. Recognizing intense international curiosity surrounding the Hungarian election, they also published comprehensive English-language briefings detailing the nation’s unique disinformation ecosystem.

In the Czech Republic, Demagog collaborated directly with TikTok during the 2025 parliamentary campaign. With platform support, they produced media-literacy-focused vertical videos that appeared prominently on TikTok’s official election landing page and were amplified via paid promotions, reaching millions of users.

Moldovan fact-checker Stop Fals—launched by the Association of Independent Press (API) in 2015—experimented aggressively across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They partnered with the national public broadcaster to analyze candidate statements during live debates and collaborated with prominent news creators. To disarm absurdity with creativity, Stop Fals teamed up with renowned Moldovan cartoonist Alex Buretz to visualize viral, outlandish falsehoods—such as pro-Kremlin narratives alleging that pro-Western President Maia Sandu was attempting to purchase the biological material of international celebrities.

Petru Macovei, executive director of API, underscored the necessity of collaborating with trusted community figures.

“We have cooperated with popular faces in social media but also with local influencers, such as social workers or postmen. These are the people citizens in rural areas or people from older generations trust,” Macovei said.

Educate Audiences—Especially Senior Citizens and Vulnerable Communities

Media literacy is widely recognized as a generational investment, but election cycles demand immediate, targeted educational outreach. All five organizations routinely conduct media literacy workshops in schools and civic centers. However, their outreach frequently extends into marginalized or high-risk demographics.

During the Hungarian election cycle, journalists from Lakmusz traveled to isolated rural settlements near the Romanian border. In one village of 300 residents—predominantly of Roma background who relied exclusively on Facebook and state-aligned media for news—the objective was not to force viewers to abandon traditional channels, but rather to cultivate healthy cognitive skepticism.

In Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria, specialized media literacy programs focus on senior citizens. Older populations are frequently targeted by financial scams and disproportionately vulnerable to online disinformation due to high consumption rates on social media. Factcheck.bg instituted a direct-engagement project allowing elderly citizens to submit suspicious posts directly to journalists for verification, serving as a vital listening post for newsrooms navigating opaque algorithmic feeds.

API in Moldova piloted an intergenerational media literacy project in the country’s northern regions, pairing young people and seniors in joint training workshops to co-produce community activities and critical-thinking video campaigns.

3. Supporting Data & Foreign Interference: The Reality of Kremlin Influence

A central question facing watchdogs in Central and Eastern Europe is the true scale and impact of foreign information manipulation, particularly from Russian state actors. While Russian interference is an undeniable reality, regional data indicates that its potency varies wildly depending on domestic vulnerabilities.

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
                 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DISINFORMATION SOURCES
+---------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Country             | Primary Threat Vector | Relative Impact                   |
+---------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Moldova             | High (Foreign/Hybrid) | Massive influence via church,     |
|                     |                       | regional proxies, and oligarchs.  |
+---------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Bulgaria            | High (Hybrid/Domestic)| Overt overlap between pro-Russian |
|                     |                       | political groups and social media.|
+---------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Czech Republic      | Low-to-Moderate       | Hundreds of fake accounts found;  |
|                     |                       | domestic issues dominated debate. |
+---------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Hungary             | Moderate (Hybrid)     | Low reach for foreign bots;       |
|                     |                       | massive reach for domestic state  |
|                     |                       | fearmongering narratives.         |
+---------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+

Moldova and Bulgaria: Deep Hybrid Pressure

In Moldova and Bulgaria, Russian influence operations operate at scale due to pre-existing political alignments and linguistic ties. In Moldova, interference is multi-layered: it includes the heavy influence of the Russian Orthodox Church, pervasive control over regional media ecosystems, and financial networks tied to sanctioned oligarch Ilan Shor. Territorial fault lines like Transnistria and Gagauzia remain particularly susceptible to Kremlin-backed messaging. According to API’s Macovei, sustained media literacy campaigns remain the most effective antidote, as foreign actors continuously attempt to destabilize democratic institutions even outside formal election windows.

In Bulgaria, pro-Russian political actors and social media networks march in lockstep. Vassilena Dotkova noted that during the prolonged parliamentary cycles, drawing a distinct line between organic domestic propaganda and coordinated Russian influence was frequently impossible due to explicit structural overlaps.

Czech Republic and Hungary: The Dominance of Domestic Disinformation

Conversely, elections in the Czech Republic and Hungary revealed that local political actors often weaponize disinformation far more effectively than foreign intelligence services.

In the Czech Republic, researchers and journalists detected hundreds of anonymous, pro-Russian TikTok accounts spreading anti-establishment narratives ahead of the 2025 vote. However, comprehensive post-election studies by organizations like Alliance for Europe found no evidence of coordinated, large-scale foreign interference dictating the outcome. Domestic political polarization proved to be the primary driver of misleading content.

In Hungary, while known Russian state-linked operations (such as the infamous influence group Storm-1516) targeted opposition figures like Péter Magyar with fabricated scandals—such as falsely linking party members to the criminal network of Jeffrey Epstein—their actual reach was minimal, garnering only a few hundred views on Facebook.

In stark contrast, domestic political machinery proved devastatingly effective. Fearmongering advertisements and synthetic AI war videos produced by entities aligned with the ruling Fidesz party—which warned voters that an opposition victory would mean immediate conscription and deployment of Hungarian soldiers to Ukraine—were viewed hundreds of thousands of times across the digital public sphere.

4. Official Responses and Implications: The Cost of Truth-Telling

The institutional role of fact-checkers brings acute professional hazards. Across the region, independent watchdogs face a coordinated pushback: being branded as partisan censors.

Both the Czech Republic’s Demagog and Hungary’s Lakmusz participated in the European Union’s Rapid Response System (RRS), an initiative designed to monitor digital public spaces and report systemic disinformation platform violations ahead of EU-wide democratic processes. However, participation carried severe reputational costs.

"We were labelled as the organisation that censors the internet and that has a large influence on the outcome of the elections," noted Demagog’s Jan Fridrichovský.

While public hostility often recedes after election days conclude, the baseline level of targeted harassment directed at journalists has intensified across every jurisdiction. Verbal abuse, legal intimidation, and coordinated online smear campaigns are frequently initiated or amplified by mainstream political actors seeking to discredit watchdog verification.

Faced with severe harassment, fact-checking leadership balances the necessity of accountability with self-preservation. While serious threats of physical harm or severe defamation are reported to law enforcement agencies—as noted by API’s Petru Macovei—most low-level online abuse is deliberately ignored. Responding directly to bad-faith accusations, watchdogs argue, only serves to amplify falsehoods and grant unmerited oxygen to manufactured controversies.

Ultimately, the experiences of Central and Eastern European fact-checkers offer a sobering global blueprint. As democratic elections worldwide become increasingly vulnerable to synthetic media, algorithmic manipulation, and polarized domestic rhetoric, the survival of factual journalism depends on early pre-bunking, radical experimentation with accessible formats, deep community-level engagement, and the unyielding resilience of local watchdogs willing to stand on the frontlines of truth.