On September 29, in a quiet administrative gesture that carried enormous strategic weight, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk signed an order creating the Center for Combating Disinformation. The document officially took effect the following day, September 30, and the news was delivered by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digitalization Krzysztof Gawkowski at the 8th Cybersecurity Forum in Warsaw. Gawkowski framed the moment as historic: Poland would become the first country in Europe to establish a single, unified government center devoted entirely to fighting disinformation. This is far more than a bureaucratic reshuffle. It is a public acknowledgment that information has become a battlefield. For years, Poland has stood on the front lines of hybrid warfare. Its geographical proximity to Russia and Belarus, its role as a vital transit hub for military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and its growing importance in European security have made it a permanent target for manipulation campaigns. The new center is intended to be the country’s sole government agency for countering disinformation, drawing together monitoring, analysis, response, and policy under one roof. By creating a dedicated institution, Poland is signaling that lies and distortions are no longer secondary concerns but core threats to national security. The decision also reflects how much the country has learned since the migration crisis, the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine, and years of relentless smear campaigns. Older structures were often too slow, too fragmented, or too uncertain to respond. The center is an attempt to build something modern and agile, capable of keeping pace with adversaries who can flood digital platforms with millions of coordinated messages within hours. It is not an exaggeration to say that the signature on that document marked the beginning of a new chapter in Poland’s digital defense.
Gawkowski was blunt about the reasons for urgency. Disinformation, particularly that spread by Russia and Belarus, is constantly rising and is being used to destabilize Poland. These words are not abstract. The region has already lived through many consequences of information warfare. False claims about refugees, vaccines, NATO deployments, Ukrainian grain, and Polish-Ukrainian relations have circulated for years. Some narratives are designed to stoke fear, others to inflame ethnic resentment, and still others to undermine Poles’ confidence in their government, military, and European allies. As Gawkowski stressed, Poland wants not only to respond to disinformation at the legislative level, but also to counter it effectively and in a timely manner. This dual approach is essential. Laws create a framework, but they cannot, by themselves, defeat real-time information attacks. A falsified video can travel across the globe before a parliament can pass a resolution. A coordinated army of bot accounts can dominate a social-media trend in minutes. The new center is intended to give Poland the capacity to act quickly. It will support the government in the fight against disinformation and help develop a strategic framework for countering such campaigns. That means identifying the forces behind the attacks, understanding their methods, predicting their next targets, and delivering clear, factual information to the public before myths harden into accepted reality. It also means creating protocols for cooperation among ministries, intelligence services, police, and private technology companies. Without coordination, even sincere efforts can become disjointed and counterproductive. With coordination, Poland hopes to make disinformation a costly and risky enterprise for those who deploy it.
The establishment of the center did not happen overnight. Behind the public announcement was months of careful work, coordinated by Deputy Minister of Digitalization Paweł Olszewski, who is responsible for cybersecurity. His involvement highlights how deeply disinformation is connected to digital infrastructure and national security. In practice, the new agency will need to combine the talents of cybersecurity specialists, media analysts, psychologists, linguists, and intelligence officers. Disinformation is a psychological operation as much as a technical one. It exploits human emotions—fear, anger, exhaustion, suspicion—so a credible defense must understand those emotions. This is why the human dimension matters. The center is not just about algorithms and firewalls. It is about protecting real people from being manipulated by foreign adversaries. When a worried grandparent forwards a message about a phantom attack on a Polish city, that person is not a malicious actor; that person is a target. The center’s job is to expose such falsehoods quickly and to offer people trustworthy alternatives. Gawkowski called the center the country’s sole government agency dedicated to countering disinformation, which means it will not compete with other institutions but rather coordinate them. In a political landscape often marked by scattered responsibilities, this is a significant step. It creates one clear point of accountability. If a disinformation campaign succeeds, there will be no ambiguity about who should have acted. If it fails, the center can take rightful credit. This clarity is especially important in a democracy, where citizens must be able to trust that their institutions are working on their behalf. Being first in Europe puts Poland in the spotlight. The success or failure of this experiment will be studied by allies and adversaries alike.
The timing of the announcement, during the 8th Cybersecurity Forum in Warsaw, could not have been more fitting. The forum brought together the very people who will have to cooperate with the new center: government officials, military leaders, industry experts, and researchers. But the broader background was unsettled. In the days and weeks leading up to the announcement, Poland had absorbed a series of alarming security incidents. A Russian military helicopter violated Polish airspace, reigniting concerns about the Kremlin’s willingness to test NATO’s patience. Two Polish airports were closed again after what were described as Russian-related attacks, sending a chill through a public already anxious about hybrid threats. These are not trivial matters; they are moments of vulnerability, and vulnerability is precisely what disinformation feeds on. During such times, rumors spread quickly: warnings of imminent invasion, claims of hidden saboteurs, fabricated reports of new strikes. The suspicious fire at a Starlink ground station in Poland added yet another layer of uncertainty. Even a single damaged piece of infrastructure becomes a blank screen onto which people project their worst fears. Who started the fire? Was it sabotage or accident? Without official clarity, speculation rushes in. A centralized, rapid-response institution can cut through that noise. It can offer timely updates, debunk false claims, and calm public fears without waiting for lengthy interministerial processes. The new center is designed to be that voice. Its mandate to develop a strategic framework means it will not simply react; it will prepare playbooks for multiple scenarios. Airspace violations, airport closures, suspicious fires, and hybrid attacks are no longer distant possibilities. They are part of the new normal, and the center must be equipped to face them.
Alongside the disinformation center, Poland has also been moving to strengthen public safety and trust in other ways. Officials announced plans to significantly increase fines for disorderly conduct on airplanes and at airports. At first glance, this may seem unrelated to information security. But order and safety are intertwined, especially in high-visibility places where panic can spread rapidly. An airport is not just a terminal of gates and security scanners; it is a stage where collective emotions are quickly amplified. A disorderly passenger, a bomb hoax, or a wild rumor can create chaos out of proportion to the initial cause. Heavier fines are meant to deter those who threaten public safety, but they also send a broader message: Poland treats these spaces as critical infrastructure and will not tolerate behavior that endangers the traveling public. The same logic applies to the tragic knife attack at a monastery, in which a Ukrainian man attacked people and killed one person. This terrible incident, involving a Ukrainian national, immediately became raw material for social media. It had all the ingredients for a toxic narrative: violence, a foreign name, and a religious setting. Those hostile to both Poland and Ukraine could exploit it to inflame tensions between neighboring peoples who, under tremendous pressure, had managed to forge remarkable solidarity. Every crime has complex facts and must be handled with compassion and due process. But in the information sphere, nuance is often the first casualty. Disinformation actors seize on such moments to erase context and insert propaganda. A central anti-disinformation body will not stop crime or hatred, but it can give honest officials a platform to respond quickly with verified facts, to condemn violence without scapegoating communities, and to prevent one horrifying act from becoming a weapon of mass division. That is the real work of the new center: not to polish the government’s image, but to preserve the shared reality on which democracy depends.
For ordinary Poles, the creation of this center may appear to be just one more government institution in a confusing world. But it deserves deeper attention. It is a sign that the country recognizes the nature of the threat it faces. Poland has not chosen to close itself off, silence critics, or abandon the digital space. Instead, it has chosen to create an institution dedicated to truth, vigilance, and public resilience. That is a deeply human, democratic response. Disinformation is ultimately a violation of personal autonomy. It attempts to steal people’s judgment, to make them believe things that serve a foreign power’s interests rather than their own. The Center for Combating Disinformation will not be perfect. There will be mistakes, debates about free expression, and difficult questions about how far countermeasures should go. But its establishment is a powerful step toward resilience. Gawkowski’s announcement and Tusk’s signature remind us that the future of any country is shaped not only on battlefields, but also in the stories people tell and the information they choose to trust. In the coming months, the center’s experts will begin their work: mapping threats, training local officials, answering questions from worried citizens, and strengthening alliances. They will do so under the shadow of provocations—the helicopters, the airport closures, the suspicious fires, the social-media storms. But they will also carry a unique responsibility: to prove that an open society can defend itself without losing its soul. As Poland moves forward as a modern European nation, the Center for Combating Disinformation stands as a quiet declaration of independence from manipulation. It says that Poland’s future will be decided by its people, not by hidden algorithms and cynical operatives of hostile powers. And that is a story worth telling.