War used to be something that happened on a map, with front lines you could draw in red and blue. Today, the front line is a timeline. It runs through Twitter feeds and TikTok recommendation pages, through Facebook groups and YouTube comments, through a hundred thousand anonymous accounts that were created not to share a human experience but to share a human emotion — specifically, outrage. The weapons are no longer only missiles; they are screens. The bombs are no longer only explosive; they are viral. When a false story can reach millions of people before a single fact-check has been published, the speed of the platform becomes a weapon in itself. This is the battlefield Polish Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski is talking about when he says a digital war with Russia is underway. Poland understands this threat better than most countries, because it sits on the edge of the conflict and has seen how disinformation can be used to divide societies even before a single soldier moves. Gawkowski has made a name for himself by speaking plainly about threats that others prefer to describe in vague corporate terms, and his latest warning is characteristically blunt: social media platforms are not neutral territory in this war. They are, he says, “silent allies” of Russian disinformation. The full quote is worth reading slowly: “A digital war with Russia is underway, and within this digital war lies a front of disinformation. On this disinformation front, there is a silent ally to the Russian bots and the Kremlin’s GRU: social media platforms.” It is a hard accusation, but Gawkowski is not aiming for diplomatic comfort. He is aiming at Silicon Valley’s conscience — or, if necessary, at its pocketbook. Because in his view, and increasingly in the view of Poland’s government, the platforms are not merely failing to fight back. They are allowing themselves to be used, and in doing so, they are taking a side by default.
To understand why he uses such strong language, you have to look at the data. Poland’s national research institute, NASK, is not a political pressure group. It is a state-backed institution that monitors the internet the way other agencies monitor borders, looking for threats that can destabilize a nation from the inside. In the first half of 2026, NASK sent more than 65,000 notifications to social media platforms about fake accounts and disinformation content. These were not random tips from annoyed users. They were organized, evidence-based reports from a professional institution whose entire purpose is to identify and counter online threats. If the platforms genuinely cared about safety, 65,000 official reports should have triggered an urgent internal review, not a shrug. Instead, the platforms responded to fewer than one in four of those notifications. Out of the entire mountain of reported cases, only 7 percent resulted in the offending content being removed. Just over 17 percent were even subjected to any form of moderation, which in practice can mean anything from a warning label added weeks later to a quiet reduction in visibility for a post that has already gone viral. The rest — more than 75 percent of the reported fake accounts, bot networks, and disinformation posts — were left standing, left online, left to keep spreading. Gawkowski sees these numbers as a smoking gun. He argues that the figures point not to an underfunded moderation team or to a temporary technical problem, but to a deliberate choice. When a platform receives a report about a bot network and decides not to act, that is not an oversight; it is a decision. When the same platform sends the same evasive response to thousands of state reports, it is not being transparent; it is being obstructionist. The sheer scale of the silence is the story.
Yet Gawkowski did not stop at accusing the platforms of neglect. He accused them of something far more serious: of treating Russian disinformation as a business opportunity, of profiting from the very content that undermines the countries they claim to serve. “The data points not merely to a failure,” he said, “but to deliberate action by the platforms — which profit from disinformation, use it, and treat it as a source of their revenue.” Let’s be honest about how radical that statement is. A government minister is standing in front of the news media and telling the world’s most powerful tech companies that they are not accidental victims of Russian manipulation; they are beneficiaries. It’s an uncomfortable claim, but it fits the economic logic of social media. Engagement is the currency, and disinformation is a high-yield investment. Content that makes people angry, scared, or confused is shared more. Sharing produces more time on the platform. More time produces more ad inventory. More ad inventory produces more money. Russian influence operations understand this dynamic perfectly. They do not build bot networks for fun; they build them to manufacture outrage, because outrage is what keeps the system humming. A network of fake accounts amplifying a divisive hashtag is not a flaw in the algorithm; it is the algorithm working exactly as designed. The platform can truthfully claim that the accounts are not representative of the community, but the algorithm still surfaces them, the advertisers still reach them, and the shareholders still profit from the attention they generate. Every time a viral fake is watched, clicked, or shared, it creates measurable value for the company that hosts it. It is easy to call this a conspiracy theory, but the evidence is in the design. Gawkowski is asking people to stop seeing these incidents as isolated mistakes and to start seeing them as a structural conflict of interest — one in which the people who own the battlefield have a financial stake in the war.
His response has been to issue a set of demands as specific as they are tough. First, the platforms must create effective moderation teams that actually operate in the Polish language. This might sound obvious until you remember how many content moderators work through automated translation, regional hubs, and generic policies. The subtleties of Polish political rhetoric — the historical wounds, the regional grievances, the local conspiracy theories that blend old fears with new technology — are invisible to a reviewer who does not understand the country. A team that cannot read the language cannot judge the context, and a team that cannot judge the context cannot protect the public. Second, those teams must be able to communicate directly and in real time with the organizations and authorized entities in Poland that report suspicious content. Poland is not asking for a public relations channel; it is asking for a working relationship with the people who are doing the hard job of monitoring disinformation. Third, Gawkowski has demanded the elimination of what he calls sham appeal procedures. This is the familiar experience of reporting a dangerous post, receiving a robotic message saying the report has been reviewed, and then discovering that nothing actually happened. He wants those procedures to be replaced with real, accountable reviews in which decisions can be explained and challenged. Fourth, any detected bot network must be removed immediately. Not “eventually,” not “after further analysis,” but immediately. And fifth, the response time to all such reports must be reduced from weeks to something that can actually prevent harm. These demands may sound ambitious, but they are actually common sense if you believe that online safety is a real commitment rather than a marketing slogan. The minister has made it clear that this is not an opening negotiating position. If a state request is left unfulfilled, Poland will begin imposing financial penalties. “Any state request left unfulfilled by these platforms will trigger proceedings to impose financial penalties upon them,” he concluded. In other words, the era of polite requests and corporate promises is over.
The urgency of all this becomes clear when you consider what was happening in Poland around its Independence Day. Russian disinformation channels intensified their campaign against Ukraine, and they did it with precision. The narratives were familiar but effective: Poland and Ukraine are on the verge of falling out; Polish society is exhausted by the refugee crisis; Ukrainian leaders have forgotten their gratitude; Europe is being dragged into a conflict that nobody wants. Each story had a grain of truth, and that is exactly what made it dangerous. Poland has indeed hosted millions of Ukrainian refugees. Poland has indeed made real economic and social sacrifices. But the disinformation takes those facts and twists them into a tale of betrayal, resentment, and fatigue. It whispers to Poles that their generosity has been exploited. It whispers to Ukrainians that their closest ally is preparing to abandon them. It whispers to the rest of Europe that solidarity is a nice idea but no one is willing to pay for it. These fakes were distributed through the same channels that NASK has been flagging for months — the same fake accounts, the same bot networks, the same pages that the platforms had every opportunity to remove. Some of these fakes were shared by accounts that looked like ordinary Poles but were later identified as parts of coordinated operations. The timing was not accidental. National holidays are moments of collective emotion, and collective emotion is exactly what disinformation needs in order to spread. The message did not have to be true; it just had to be shared, liked, and believed by enough people to create a small crack in the alliance. This is the real-life consequence of platform inaction, and it is why Gawkowski’s words have so much weight.
Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation has spent years cataloguing these operations, and its conclusion is clear: the Kremlin’s goal is not to win an argument online, but to weaken European unity and international support for Ukraine. If Poland can be made to look tired, divided, and fed up, then other European countries will feel safer in their own fatigue. If one ally begins to waver, the entire coalition becomes weaker. Poland is a bridge between Western Europe and Ukraine, a logistical hub for military aid, a refuge for millions of civilians, and a powerful political voice. If that bridge can be weakened, the consequences will be felt far beyond its borders. That is why Gawkowski’s fight with the social media platforms is about more than content moderation. It is about the resilience of democratic societies in the face of an information war. For years, the platforms have claimed to be neutral spaces, open to all voices. But in a world where one side is actively investing in automated manipulation, neutrality is a kind of surrender. Gawkowski is effectively saying: choose a side. Help us defend the truth, or face the consequences of helping those who attack it. His threat of financial penalties may be controversial, but it is also a necessary attempt to force accountability. The rest of the world should pay close attention, because this struggle will not remain Poland’s alone. If history is any guide, the platforms will promise reforms and then quietly move on. But Poland’s government is asking the public to remember, to document, and to hold them accountable. The question is no longer whether social media platforms have a responsibility to prevent disinformation. The question is whether they will finally act as if they do — before the silent ally becomes an enemy of democracy in plain sight.