Visegrád 24 is an account on X (formerly Twitter) that publishes opinions related to current events, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel–Hamas war.
It had primarily been promoting Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán, was sympathetic to United States president Donald Trump, and contained negative content about Western European political leaders.
[5] Research conducted by the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public in October 2023 found that Visegrád 24 was one of the seven most influential Twitter accounts with regard to news coverage of the Israel–Hamas war.
[4][10] The left-leaning Israeli newspaper TheMarker wrote in December 2023 that Visegrád 24 "spreads a blatant pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine narrative, including through fake news" from "a pair of Polish right-wing extremists who take an Islamophobic and xenophobic line".
[11][12] In March 2022, Visegrád 24 posted an unsourced tweet falsely claiming that Leonardo DiCaprio had donated $10 million to Ukraine.
[16] That July, it misrepresented footage of Wigan Athletic football fans as showing Ukrainians celebrating the country's attack on the Kerch bridge.
[17] Visegrád 24 was the first foreign social media account to publish a video of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin's "party speech" in August 2022.
OKO Press' article described the publication of the video as indicative of the typical modus operandi of the Russian intelligence service.
They noted, "While traditional news does at times use such imagery as well, the sheer volume of these tweets, combined with the lack of deeper analysis or context mentioned above, created for our analysts the sense of a constant stream of decontextualized anger and violence when analyzing these accounts.
[19] In February 2024, Visegrád 24 posted a video of a controlled demolition in Turkey that it claimed to show a mosque being demolished in China.
[21] The OKO.press investigation also listed Wojciech Pawelczyk, a collaborator of American alt-right commentator and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec.
[4][10] The BasedPoland account was known for its anti-refugee content and praise of far-right political leaders, including the Polish government, Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini, and Viktor Orbán.
In an interview with Rzeczpospolita in September 2022, Tompson said that he created the Visegrád 24 accounts and maintains them together with his friends who work in the social media industry.
He also considered the Prime Minister’s celebration at a time of geopolitical tension questionable and stated that he believed that many supported Finland’s NATO membership application only because “Sanna Marin is a beautiful woman”.
[10] On 31 October 2022, the Chancellery of the Polish Prime Minister awarded 1.4 million złoty (€300K) to the leisure and health promotion foundation Actionlife for a project called Visegrád 24.
The Polish news service Wirtualna Polska asked the Chancellery for more information about the Visegrád 24 project, to which the Chancellery replied that the aim is to establish an English-language website dealing with the culture, history and politics of East Central Europe and Three Seas Initiative regions, as well as countering Russian disinformation.
However, a representative of the Actionlife Foundation replied to Wirtualna Polska that the grant had been cancelled and refused to answer whether the funds were intended to be used to develop the existing Visegrád 24 service.