As Hungary approaches its 12 April 2026 parliamentary elections, the country’s online political environment is entering a new regulatory era. European rules designed to improve transparency in political advertising, most notably the EU’s Regulation on the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), are now fully in force. These rules should make digital campaigning more transparent and accountable.

But monitoring by the European Commission between late October 2025 and 20 February 2026, just before the official campaign period began, suggests that those intended aims have not been borne out in reality. Rather than disappearing, online political advertising has adapted, becoming harder to track, less transparent, and increasingly reliant on indirect methods.

Political ads didn’t disappear, they changed form

After the TTPA entered full application in October 2025, major platforms such as Meta and Google announced broad suspensions of political advertising in the EU. At first glance, this appeared to significantly limit digital campaigning.

In practice, however, paid political influence continues to circulate widely. On Meta’s platforms, one of their largest being Facebook, political actors have relied on alternative strategies such as proxy pages, which allow the user to access restricted content in their country, lifestyle or regional ‘news’ pages promoting candidates, and AI-generated campaign material that avoids explicit electoral messaging. Because these advertisements are often not labelled as political, they bypass transparency requirements such as disclosure of spending and targeting.

The problem is not only misclassification but also delayed classification. In many cases, ads ran for weeks before being reviewed or labelled as political, if they were labelled at all. This suggests that in practice, enforcement depends heavily on interpreting the content of ads rather than identifying the political actors behind them.

Is transparency actually declining?

In a contradictory manner, transparency around political advertising has declined since platforms introduced their bans.

On Meta, the political advertising library has been merged into a broader advertising database, making political campaigns more difficult to identify and analyse. Misclassified or unlabelled ads no longer trigger transparency requirements, meaning researchers and the public lose visibility into who is paying for campaigns and how audiences are targeted.

The situation is even more restrictive on Google. When the company suspended political advertising in September 2025, it also shut down its political ads repository and removed historical data. Ads that violate Google’s policies are deleted entirely from the public transparency interface once terminated, making it almost impossible to reconstruct the content circulated after the fact.

On TikTok, transparency is limited by a different set of issues. The platform maintains a ‘Commercial Content Library’, but its search functions and indexing logic are inconsistent. Exact-phrase search requirements, the absence of removed ads, and unstable search results significantly limit the repository’s usefulness for monitoring political content.

The Law Exists, The Enforcer Doesn’t

The Hungarian case also highlights a structural problem: the rules exist, but they are not being enforced nationally.

A January 2026 freedom-of-information response from the Hungarian Ministry of Justice confirmed that the country has not assigned a local authority the responsibility for enforcing the TTPA. Nor has it adopted the sanctioning rules required under the regulation.

In practical terms, this means that while the regulation applies directly across the EU, there is currently no national body in Hungary to investigate or sanction violations. Political actors can therefore run ambiguous or misclassified ads without facing immediate domestic enforcement.

Influencers role in campaign infrastructure

Another emerging trend is the growing role of political influencers. In recent years, influencer networks have become important channels for distributing political messaging in Hungary. These creators can reach large audiences organically, often sharing short, algorithm-optimised content aligned with political narratives.

This creates a regulatory blind spot. If influencers are compensated indirectly, for example, through travel, access, or logistical support, but their posts are not purchased through platform advertising systems, they do not appear in political advertising repositories. As a result, large-scale political messaging campaigns can take place outsideTTPA oversight.

Why does this matter for EU regulation?

The Hungarian experience offers an early warning about how political campaigning may evolve under new EU rules.

Internal platform bans on political advertising have not removed political messaging from social media. Instead, they appear to have shifted campaigns toward formats that are less transparent and harder to monitor.

What should happen next?

Several targeted measures could address the issues identified in this monitoring period.

First, the European Commission should prioritise the rapid establishment of the European repository for online political advertisements under the TTPA. Clear guidance should confirm that advertisements rejected or removed under internal platform bans must still be recorded in the repository to ensure transparency and auditability.

Second, the design of the repository should be developed in consultation with researchers and civil society organisations to ensure usability for systematic monitoring and analysis.

Third, the Commission should urge Member States, including Hungary, to designate competent authorities responsible for TTPA enforcement and to establish the sanctioning regimes required under Articles 21–25 of the Regulation.

Fourth, the DSA enforcement team should communicate clearly to very large online platforms that unclear or inconsistently enforced bans on political advertising are not adequate risk mitigation measures under Articles 34–35 DSA. Where platforms maintain bans on political advertising, these bans should be clearly defined, consistently applied and supported by transparent reporting.

Finally, platforms should be encouraged to maintain their own comprehensive and searchable repositories of political advertisements, including advertisements that were rejected, removed or prohibited. Maintaining such archives would constitute a meaningful good-faith effort to mitigate systemic risks to electoral processes and civic discourse under Article 35 DSA.

To learn more about Hungary's online political environment, read our Phase II Monitoring Brief here. 

Where to read more?

We Need More Clarity on the Definition of Political Advertisement

Why Should We Worry About Google’s Decision to Stop Serving Political Advertising in The EU?

​Behind the Screens: How Digital Platforms Influence the 2024 EP Elections

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