Inside Visegrad24, a Polish news site pushing a right-wing agenda about South Africa to the world

‘Why a Zulu now supports Orania’s self-determination”. “South Africa’s Government: The World’s Most Race-Obsessed Regime”. “The Systemic Marginalization of White South Africans: A First-Hand Perspective”.

These are all articles currently published recently on Visegrad24.com, a Polish website and extremely prominent X account named after a medieval congress which brought together the Bohemian, Hungarian and Polish kingdoms.

Until recently, its content was devoted almost exclusively to the Israel-Hamas conflict, the war in Ukraine and the supposed decline of Europe as a result of mass migration.

Why does it suddenly care about South Africa?

It turns out that the man behind one of the loudest “news” voices pumping out right-wing narratives online, fuelling the current culture wars and the global turning away from liberal values, has South African links.

Founder is ‘half South African’ Stefan Tompson

There is now plenty of information online about the founder of Visegrad24, but that was not always the case. It was only in September 2022 that the Polish investigative website OKO.press revealed his identity to the world.

Visegrad24, wrote journalist Anna Mierzynska at the time, is a “mysterious English-language account, giving news from ‘Central and Eastern Europe’”, which went live on Twitter in January 2020.

“The creators of Visegrad24 are very careful to remain anonymous. Asked in April 2020 by Slovenian political scientist Mario Plesej about who administers the account, they replied: ‘We are a group of friends…’”

Mierzynska noted that these claims that the site was run informally by a bunch of pals was contradicted by how “surprisingly often” its tweets were “mentioned and tagged by Polish diplomats and even by the English-language Twitter account of the Prime Minister’s Office”.

The journalist’s investigation concluded that two men were behind Visegrad24, only one of whom has since come forward to confirm ownership.

His name is Stefan Tompson, he is in his early 30s, and on X he describes himself as “Founder of @visegrad24 // Third culture kid // Polish-South African // Roman Catholic //”.

Tompson did not respond to Daily Maverick’s request for an interview this week.

Online, he is variously described as a filmmaker, content creator, owner of a beer company, and founder of a Warsaw-based PR company. His national background is similarly ambiguous.

One social media bio used to say that Tompson was “raised in London in French schools” but this has now been removed.

In a podcast interview with Michael Eisenberg, an American-Israeli venture capitalist, Tompson did not contradict Eisenberg when he said of Tompson: “You grew up in South Africa, you grew up in England.”

A profile in the Jewish Insider, however, described Tompson as having grown up “in London and the south of France”.

A Jewish Chronicle piece records that Tompson enjoyed a “charmed childhood between country homes in Italy and France”.

Given all this confusion on the matter, perhaps the safest is to defer to Tompson’s own words.

In a video interview with a Polish news outlet, Tompson, who has a very pronounced British accent and likes to wear a cravat, said that his father was “British-South African”.

He added: “My family’s been there on my father’s side for about 200 years, so we are closely tied to South Africa. I’m more South African than British.”

(In the same interview, Tompson revealed himself to have a shaky grasp of South African history when he claimed to his interviewer that Jan van Riebeeck arrived in the Cape on a boat named “The King of Poland”. In reality, Jan Riebeeck arrived on ships named Drommedaris, Goede Hoop and Reijger, or Heron.)

On social media, Tompson likes to claim his South African identity. On August 6 2024, he tweeted: “I was born after the end of apartheid, so what crimes could I have possibly committed? Or are you suggesting that being a white South African is a crime in and of itself?”

Elon Musk reportedly radicalised by Visegrad24

For some years, Visegrad24 appeared to be just one of a glut of “alternative” news outlets that have sprung up online as the influence of legacy media declines, in part because public figures are relentlessly hammering home the message that the “mainstream media” cannot be trusted.

Visegrad24’s content was fairly typical of these sites, feeding its followers a steady diet of right-wing talking points designed to feed their existing prejudices against migrants, Muslims and liberal values in general.

It described itself as “aggregating and curating news”, which meant mostly that it plagiarised images and videos from legacy news outlets which did the journalism at their own expense.

But where things exploded for Visegrad24 was after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, where it soon developed a reach which radically outstripped those of outlets like BBC and CNN.

A University of Washington report about the seven X accounts dominating coverage of the Hamas war, which listed Visegrad24 at the top, found that they “tweet in a style that erases context, spreads disturbing imagery, and adds to the emotionally charged nature of discussions surrounding the situation in Gaza”.

Visegrad24’s following soon mushroomed — despite, or because of, repeatedly broadcasting fake news to the world.

In November 2023, it posted a video of a well-known Israeli satirist mocking Palestinians and claimed it was an authentic Palestinian take. It has also repeatedly used the work of Palestinian photographer Motaz Azaiza and distorted what is shown in the images, despite public corrections by Azaiza.

It reported in March 2024 that anti-Israel protesters had gathered in front of a synagogue in Toronto to “harass Jews” who wanted to worship. Instead, the demonstration was against an event by a real estate agency at the synagogue to market property in the occupied West Bank.

Then again, the site’s propensity for spreading fake news did not start with the Israel-Hamas conflict.

As OKO.press noted back in 2022, the die was already cast. Visegrad24 tweeted a fake story about actor Leonardo DiCaprio donating money to Ukraine which subsequently had to be debunked by CNN; it claimed that Polish politicians supported the idea of creating a Polish-Ukrainian Union, which was described by real Polish journalists as “dangerous and stupid political fiction”; and it spread nonsense about PornHub blocking Russian users.

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, Visegrad24 has also tweeted increasingly brazen anti-Muslim views, including the question: “Without Googling, name something that was invented, discovered or created by Muslims over the centuries.”

Without Googling, name something that was invented, discovered or created by Muslims over the centuries. pic.twitter.com/nQjse14a4T

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 18, 2023

In January, Britain’s Financial Times identified Visegrad24 as one of “a handful of X accounts” which led X owner Elon Musk to a sudden obsession with British “grooming gangs” in January — an issue which Musk has fundamentally misrepresented on X, but used as a stick with which to beat the incumbent left-leaning Labour government, calling on King Charles to dissolve parliament and call new elections.

Musk, it is now clear, is on a global mission to overturn liberal governments, and the Financial Times suggests that Visegrad24 was one of the X accounts colouring his take on UK politics.

The Financial Times quoted former Twitter executive Bruce Daisley as suggesting that Musk “has seemingly become the first tech leader to fall down the rabbit hole of radicalisation by his own product”.

South Africa in the crosshairs

Now Tompson has turned the sights of Visegrad24 to South Africa.

In January, tweeting in his personal capacity, Tompson wrote: “Terrible what is happening in South Africa”.

Just two weeks later, US President Donald Trump would say virtually the same words to journalists: “Terrible things are happening in South Africa.”

One of his recent videos saw Tompson travel to Pretoria to meet Willem Petzer, whom he describes as “an Afrikaner content creator, political commentator and entrepreneur” rather than a notorious far-right provocateur.

The video is titled “How South Africa is Drifting Toward Communism”, and in it Petzer darkly warns the West about the dangers of “writing restorative justice into law”.

Over the past few weeks, Visegrad24 has given its 1.3 million followers on X the ongoing impression that white South Africans are indeed a persecuted species — by cherry-picking extreme views from unknown TikTok accounts, running op-eds proclaiming that “South Africa is on the brink”, and repeatedly tweeting videos containing seven-year-old utterances by Julius Malema, who reportedly spent his weekend with white farmers in Rustenburg.

The timing of this all is not coincidental — as right-wing movements around the world have been emboldened by the moves made by  Trump in his first weeks in office. To quote Wired, Trump “has taken action on virtually every single culture war topic that has excited his base for the last 12 months, including the signing of dozens of executive orders targeting immigrants, gender expression, the environment, and DEI policies”.

What has been truly remarkable has been the concatenation of South African-linked individuals in the ongoing global culture wars, as Daily Maverick has previously reported. To their ranks can now be added one more. DM