The events of the Russia Ukraine war have been heavily covered by news media organizations around the world.

On social media, particularly Twitter (now renamed “X”), the call was answered by various open-source intelligence accounts run by private citizens or organizations. These accounts gather information via publicly available sources such as broadcast T.V. and radio, social media, and websites.

Content posted these open-source intelligence accounts garnered millions of views and even outperformed major news conglomerates. One of these accounts was Visegrád 24. 

Visegrád 24 is a right-wing Polish account on X, created in January 2020. According to their biography, they “aggregate and curate news, politics and current affairs.” 

In an interview following the page’s inception, the administrators told Slovenian political scientist Mario Plesej, they would describe themselves as a group of friends interested in the Visegrád Group (a cultural and political alliance of four European countries: Poland, Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia). They also revealed that many of them work in the news industry, universally representing a conservative worldview.

However, Visegrád 24 is not an official news service and lacks any sort of journalistic credentials.  It is this ambiguous status that allows Visegrád to operate with little regulation. Jan Smoleński, political scientist, lecturer at the University of Warsaw, comments that their “purpose is to promote and advance the right-wing perspective from Poland and the CEE region.” He presents Visegrád 24 as an attempt to introduce balance in voices: “liberal-left views from Poland are dominant in the English-speaking media sphere, so supposedly in the interest of fairness and balance there needs to be a conservative one.”

Therefore, Visegrád 24 also has no real obligation to source their stories, verify their information, or credit their sources. This is especially problematic in an age as open-source intelligence is heavily relied upon for unfolding current events. 

The lack of consequences leads to misinformation in news being spread. 

This is the inevitable outcome when self-declared “media and news companies” operate on sites like X. Complicated and nuanced current events are presented as 3-second headlines to the passing viewer, leaving an incomplete news account.

For Visegrád 24, there is no board of directors threatening to cut funding, as they don’t need any. They have their own network and independent platform. X has provided them the chance to reach an enormous international audience, with few guardrails on accurate reporting. 

So who is behind the creation and administration of Visegrád 24? Officially, Visegrád 24 is run by a group of unnamed authors, but one name has been confirmed: Stefan Tompson. 

Tompson was a British PR specialist who has been working in Poland since 2014. Since then, he has become associated with MEGA (Make Europe Great Again), a right wing movement. In an interview with Polish publication Rzeczpospolita, he revealed that he had created Visegrád 24’s profiles. 

Another alleged founder of Visegrád 24 is journalist Adam Starzyński, who was credited as Visegrád 24’s editor in an interview with Brussels Signal, a European political publication. Starzyński also used to work for a Polish right-wing TV channel, TV Republika. Moreover, he was also known for running @basedpoland, an ultra-conservative X account with 150,000 followers before it was banned. 

Visegrád 24’s popularity surged during the Russo-Ukrainian war. At the height of Western sentiment for Ukraine, Visegrád 24’s account became a hub for all things pro-Ukranian. The strategy was simple. First, they capitalized on increased Western attention regarding Ukraine. 

This was not difficult at all, as all they had to do was repost or echo the reports of other sources, sources that were considered reliable such as Ukrainian government media, or mainstream news networks. This gave them a massive following and a reputation as a reliable source for all things Ukraine (unless you were Russian). The University of Tartu, in a publication from March of 2022, recognized Visegrád 24 as a reliable source of information related to the war in Ukraine. 

But this should not vindicate them from the content they have posted since. They may have been seen as reliable early on in the Russia-Ukraine war, but as a social media profile that is not a news network, they have no real obligation to stay that way. During the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, Visegrád 24’s content became less reliable.

In March of 2022, Visegrád 24 tweeted that “Leonardo DiCaprio has donated 10 million USD to Ukraine. His maternal grandmother was a native of Odessa, Ukraine!” The tweet cited no sources, despite having almost 200,000 followers at the time. The tweet recieved many impressions, having about 10,000 reposts.

The tweet was deleted after CNN informed the Visegrád administrators that the claim was false. A representative told CNN that, “It seems we fell prey to a fake story ourselves. Happens to the best of us!” When asked where the story was sourced from, they stated that “We saw the story tweeted by several small news accounts, citing an anonymous source.”

In May 2023, Visegrád 24 tweeted, “incoming reports of the Freedom for Russia Legion having downed a Russian Mi-8 helicopter in the Belgorod region of Russia. The Legion crossed the border from Ukraine this morning and is now fighting against the Russian Army in the area.” This too was false. The video posted was of smoke from a fire in Crimea, from footage shot in 2022.

Despite this, their views have not stagnated. According to a study published by the Center For an Informed Public at the University of Washington, of the 399 posts on the Israeli-Hamas conflict, Visegrád received 371,770,355 total views.

Scrolling down Visegrád 24’s feed, it’s evident that they do no real reporting themselves, as they don’t release original content. There are rarely interviews conducted by Visegrád staff, and no research is ever published by employees. 

Instead, Visegrád merely republishes actual reporters’ reporting through reposts, “curating” the news to their massive audience to match their rhetoric.

This is the danger of groups such as Visegrád 24. Hundreds of miles away from danger, they war-monger on their online platform, to which they have been placed center-stage. 

Millions of people see Visegrád 24’s “content,” and without looking into it further, take it as fact. It’s a problem for journalism, and it ignores good reporters who go out of their way to see both sides of a story, who verify and authenticate. 

It’s people like Starzyński and Tompson that widen the divide between ordinary people, as they propagate their causes day and night. The search for the “true story” has long since ended. Real journalism is in decline and Visegrád 24 is contributing to the problem. 

Note: Visegrád 24 shares no association with “Visegrád Insight,” which is a central European analysis and media platform. Visegrad Insight generates future policy directions for Europe and transatlantic partners.

It’s a problem for journalism, and ignores good reporters who go out of their way to see both sides of a story, who verify and authenticate.