On the morning of 7 November, anyone scrolling through social media in Poland might have believed the constitutional order was ending. A video clip, shared thousands of times, appeared to show President Karol Nawrocki delivering a grim national address about the Supreme Court’s latest ruling. In another video, a female Constitutional Tribunal judge seemed so furious that she slammed a folder onto her desk, announced that she had lost all faith in the system, and walked out of the courtroom in tears. The only problem is that none of these moments ever happened. The faces were real; the words and actions were fabrications, generated and manipulated by artificial intelligence. The report by Ewan Jones, published on 7 November 2026, describes how disinformation has flooded the Polish internet during the ongoing top court drama. The sheer scale is difficult to quantify, but some early signals are alarming: on the X platform alone, researchers have identified at least thirty-six separate posts that use deepfakes of President Nawrocki. That number covers only him. It does not count the fake videos of judges, government officials, party leaders, legal experts, or ordinary citizens who have suddenly found their faces attached to statements they never made. Some of the fakes are crude and easy to spot: mouths moving out of sync, voices with a disturbing robotic flatness, shadows and reflections behaving weirdly. Others are disturbingly polished, with natural intonation, convincing gestures, and even the correct angles of a television studio. The result is a fog of confusion. In that fog, a reasonable person can no longer tell what is true and what is invented. And because the underlying crisis is so tense, the fakes do not merely mislead; they ignite pre-existing fears. For weeks, Poles have been watching a dramatic standoff over the constitutional court, with accusations of illegal appointments, political interference, and violated procedures. Into that flammable space, anonymous networks have poured synthetic content designed to provoke every possible emotion: anger at the government, anger at the opposition, contempt for judges, and even despair about the survival of democracy itself.
To understand why these deepfakes have found such fertile ground, it is necessary to look at the long and exhausting political battle that led to this moment. Poland’s judicial system has not been calm for many years. The Constitutional Tribunal, in particular, has been at the center of repeated clashes between the government, the Parliament, the president, and the courts themselves. Supporters of the judicial changes say that the reforms were meant to clean up a corrupt and outdated system, to make judges accountable, and to ensure that the voice of ordinary citizens was heard. Critics see the same changes as a dangerous power grab, an attempt by politicians to control who can wear a robe and decide the meaning of the constitution. The truth is not simple. But in the social media ecosystem, simplicity is the only thing that travels well. Each side has spent years building its own set of facts. Each side has its preferred experts, its own vocabulary for describing the enemy, and its own list of heroic judges and villainous politicians. When the Constitutional Tribunal was suddenly pulled into the center of yet another crisis, the existing divisions became explosive. Every news program interpreted the events through its own partisan lens. Every political leader used the moment to rally supporters. And every anonymous social media account sensed an opportunity. The report makes clear that the latest disinformation was not a spontaneous outburst but something more organized. A video of President Nawrocki supposedly saying that he will ignore a tribunal ruling, or that he has ordered the army to protect the court, or that he is preparing to declare a state of emergency, is intentionally designed to trigger a specific anxiety. A video of a judge resigning in despair is equally strategic: it tells viewers that even those inside the system believe it is broken. The old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has put on its shoes has never been more accurate. But in today’s digital world, the lie does not just travel; it multiplies. It is repackaged, translated, remixed, and sent into private messaging groups, where fact-checkers cannot easily reach it. By the time the truth appears, the emotional damage is already done. The court drama is not merely an argument over legal paragraphs. It is a struggle over the very idea of authority: who is allowed to define what is legal, what is just, and what is legitimate. Disinformation is the weapon of choice in that struggle.
The mechanics of this new wave of disinformation deserve close attention. The report, drawing on work by journalists and analysts, highlights an alarming but increasingly familiar pattern: artificial intelligence has made political deception cheap, fast, and massively scalable. A few years ago, creating a believable fake video of a president required a professional production studio, skilled animators, and hours of careful work. Today, a person with a laptop, a free voice-cloning application, and a public dataset of someone’s speeches can produce a convincing fake in a few hours. Voice cloning technology needs only a small sample of clear audio to copy a person’s tone, rhythm, and even their breathlessness. Lip-syncing algorithms can then map the fabricated audio onto a real video of the person, adjusting the mouth and facial expressions in ways that deceive most human eyes. In the case studied by the report, researchers found that the deepfakes were not all created by the same hand. Some were relatively simple, perhaps made as experiments. Others contained subtle markers—watermarks, file names, and error patterns—that connect them to a more professional operation. The thirty-six deepfaked Nawrocki posts on X are likely only the visible tip of an iceberg. There have also been manipulated still images, forged court documents, fake text conversations, and audio clips of phone calls that may never have happened. The accounts spreading these materials look remarkably authentic. They have profile pictures, posting histories, friends, and followers. Some of them are bots, but many are real people who have been tricked into sharing something that they genuinely believe is true. This is what makes the problem so difficult to solve. You cannot simply arrest an algorithm or fine a feeling of outrage. The report also notes that the same digital artifacts have appeared in posts from accounts that claim to be political enemies, which suggests the existence of a coordinating actor or at least a shared toolbox. The strategy seems to be pure chaos. The goal is not to convince everyone of one particular lie. It is to produce so many contradictions that people simply stop trying to figure out what is real. When the President’s real advice gets buried under ten fake speeches, when a court’s actual ruling is drowned out by five doctored versions, when every video seems suspicious, the natural human response is fatigue. And from fatigue comes indifference. A society that no longer believes anything is a society that can no longer defend its own truth.
What makes this even more tragic is the human cost hidden behind the statistics. The people being impersonated are not characters in a science fiction story; they are actual human beings with families, reputations, and daily lives. President Nawrocki has been forced to publicly deny statements he never made. His staff watches each wave of fakes in the hope of correcting the most dangerous ones before they spread too far. Judges have found themselves cast as villains in stories they never participated in. Their faces appear beside fake quotes of corruption and extremism. They have received hateful messages, threats, and calls for violence—not because of anything they did, but because a stranger on the internet decided to put a false story into circulation. Their children go to school and hear lies about their parents. Their friends wonder if the video is real. The pressure is tremendous. Ordinary citizens also carry the burden. Imagine an older woman in a small Polish town who sees a video of the President announcing that the constitutional court has been abolished and that radical measures are needed. She does not check the account’s history. She does not examine the comment section for fact-checks. She clicks share, sends it to her family group, and then spends the rest of the day feeling anxious and confused. She is not malicious; she is human. She trusts that if it is on the internet and looks like the President, it must be true. Or consider a law student who has spent years dreaming of practicing law, only to be confronted by endless videos suggesting that the entire judiciary is corrupt. The student begins to wonder why they should even bother. The cumulative effect of these individual moments is enormous. Every false video erodes the shared foundation on which democracy depends. At some point, people no longer ask, “What happened?” They ask, “Why should I believe anything?” This cynicism is precisely the result that the disinformation campaign seeks. It makes democracy impossible, not because people vote for the wrong candidate, but because they stop believing that democracy can ever reflect their interests. A court that is perceived as a nest of actors and algorithms cannot provide justice. A president who is perceived as synthetic has no authority. A country that cannot agree on basic facts becomes easy to rule by whatever loud voice, real or fabricated, shouts most convincingly into the panic.
So what is being done to fight this flood of falsehood? The report paints a picture of a response that is both heroic and utterly inadequate. Polish journalists, fact-checkers, and independent researchers have been working around the clock. The Polish Press Agency (PAP) and other news organizations have been carefully comparing videos, examining metadata, contacting sources, and publishing corrections as quickly as possible. In several cases, they were able to prove that a crucial video was generated by an artificial intelligence tool within hours of it appearing online. They have exposed the inconsistencies, the impossible camera angles, the mismatched lighting, and the tiny digital errors that betray the hand of a machine. But the corrections do not travel the same path as the lies. They are calmer. They are carefully worded. They ask readers to be patient and to weigh evidence. Meanwhile, the fake videos are dramatic, explosive, and designed for sharing. The X platform has tried to respond, but its efforts have been inconsistent. Sometimes a community note appears under a false post, the platform’s own attempt to add context. But too often the note appears only after the video has already been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Weakly moderated groups, encrypted chats, and accounts with no clear ownership are largely immune to fact-checking. The disinformation is not limited to X; it spreads across Telegram, Facebook, TikTok, and private messaging apps, where forensic analysis is almost impossible. Some accounts are suspended, but they return within hours under new names. Some content is removed, but it has already been downloaded and re-uploaded elsewhere. The platforms repeat their official promises about safe artificial intelligence and improved content moderation. The promises sound nice, but they rarely match the reality of the speed of deception. This is why the report suggests that the long-term solution is not simply censorship or better algorithms. It is human awareness. The strongest defense against a deepfake is a citizen who pauses before sharing. A society that teaches its children to ask three simple questions—Who created this? What is the evidence? Why does this make me feel so strongly?—will always be more resistant than one that simply waits for an algorithm to save it. Poland cannot rely on Elon Musk’s moderation team or on any other external authority to protect its public sphere. It must protect itself. That means supporting serious journalism, teaching media literacy in every school, and creating a culture in which it is acceptable to say, “I am not sure yet. Let me check.”
In the end, this is not just a story about computer-generated images or a court case. It is a story about people and the fragile ties that hold a community together. The top court drama is real, and it is serious. It involves the deepest questions of constitutional legitimacy, the limits of political power, and the role of judges in a democracy. But the disinformation flood is something even more dangerous. It transforms every debate into a spectacle, every disagreement into a war, and every citizen into either a believer or a denier. Yet Poland has survived far worse. Poles have endured decades of censorship, occupation, and the constant rewriting of history by stronger powers. This country has a deep tradition of courage, patience, and suspicion of official stories. That same suspicion, when aimed at an anonymous deepfake, becomes a powerful shield. The next time a video appears that makes you feel furious, frightened, or absolutely certain, the best advice is simple: wait. Do not share. Do not comment. Do not let that first surge of emotion make the decision for you. Look for the source. Look for a second and third source. If the story is true, it will still be true tomorrow. If it is false, you have just prevented the spread of a poison. That moment of restraint is not passive. It is a quiet act of bravery. It is how ordinary people defend their country from being disassembled by illusion. The internet will continue to flood, fakes will continue to multiply, and the world will continue to press against Poland’s nerves. But the shore is still there. It is still solid. Every skeptical pause, every article read carefully, every conversation that says “Wait, that might be fake” is one more stone placed on that shore. What matters is not that the storm ends. What matters is that we remember where we are standing and choose not to be swept away. In the chaos of deepfakes, there is still something real: our freedom to think, to question, and to care. Protecting that freedom is the work of every citizen. It is the only real answer to the flood.