On a gray October morning in Warsaw, a senior Polish minister looked directly into the cameras and said the quiet part out loud: the world’s biggest social media companies are not neutral conduits for Russian lies. Krzysztof Gawkowski, Poland’s minister of digital affairs, announced on October 21 that the state would begin imposing financial penalties on platforms that fail to remove Kremlin-linked disinformation. His words carried the weight of a country that has become one of the primary targets of Russia’s information warfare. “On this disinformation front, there is a silent ally to the Russian bots and the Kremlin’s GRU: social media platforms,” he declared during a press conference in Warsaw. To those who have watched Polish newsfeeds fill with anti-Ukrainian hatred, manipulated videos of politicians, and fake accounts designed to tear communities apart, the statement did not sound like hyperbole. Gawkowski was not announcing fines that had already been imposed; he was setting a deadline and drawing a line. If social media companies continue to disable fewer accounts than they could, if they keep treating flagging systems as an inconvenience, Poland will act. The message to Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry was unmistakable: your business model is under wartime scrutiny, and your silence is being read as complicity.
The data behind the minister’s anger is difficult to ignore. Poland’s NASK National Research Institute collected more than 65,000 reports concerning fake accounts and disinformation during the first half of 2026. Social media platforms acted on fewer than a quarter of those reports. In only 7 percent of cases did they delete content or accounts, and in slightly more than 17 percent did they apply any moderation measures at all. Behind these percentages is a human reality: local journalists and volunteers spend hours gathering screenshots of bot networks attacking Ukrainian refugees, only to see the posts remain active and spread. A fact-checker watches a heavily edited video of a Polish official go viral; by the time it is labeled false, hundreds of thousands of people have already seen it. These are not isolated incidents. They are the product of algorithms that reward anger, outrage, and polarization. Gawkowski accused technology companies of deliberately benefiting financially from disinformation rather than adequately addressing it. That is a serious charge, but it is grounded in logic: disinformation drives engagement, and engagement drives advertising revenue. The platforms may not create Russian propaganda, but by refusing to remove it quickly, they profit from it. For ordinary Poles, the consequences are not abstract. Disinformation affects how elections are perceived, how refugees are treated, how public health is undermined, and how much trust citizens place in their own institutions. Every report that disappears into an appeals black hole is another sign that platforms are not doing enough.
The minister’s prescription was practical and pointed. He demanded that social media companies create effective Polish-speaking moderation teams capable of communicating directly with Polish authorities in real time. This is not a bureaucratic luxury. Language matters deeply in disinformation. A machine can identify a hate symbol, but it cannot easily understand a subtle reference to Polish history, a sarcastic account pretending to be a patriotic group, or a fake local news site designed to look trustworthy. Human moderators who speak Polish and understand the region can make judgments in seconds that an AI might never make. Gawkowski also called for the immediate removal of identified bot networks, faster responses to reported violations, and an end to appeals procedures that allow known propaganda pages to play procedural games. He warned that every unfulfilled request from Polish authorities would trigger proceedings to impose financial penalties on the responsible company. The threat was about enforcement, not yet punishment, but the intention was clear: Poland is no longer willing to accept a system where platforms claim to fight disinformation while doing the opposite. This is not censorship. It is accountability. In a democracy, false content is a problem, but a coordinated, state-sponsored attack on the information space is not mere protected speech. The companies can no longer plead ignorance. Poland has sent them thousands of reports, and the data shows that the response has been dangerously weak.
Poland’s confrontation with social media companies reflects a broader European anxiety. Across the continent, governments have grown alarmed by Russian influence operations aimed at deepening political divisions, destabilizing democratic institutions, and weakening support for Ukraine. Moscow has consistently denied these accusations, claiming that Western governments exaggerate the threat of Russian interference for political purposes. That denial is predictable, but in Poland the threat is not an abstract talking point. It lives in border towns, in refugee centers, in online hate directed at Ukrainians, in fabricated stories about NATO convoys, and in fake accounts that pretend to be local voices. Russian propaganda has learned to look local, as one recent news story put it: “How Russian Propaganda Learned to Look Finnish.” This makes the problem especially insidious. Citizens begin to suspect that their neighbors are bots, that news outlets are enemies, that facts are negotiable. The platforms have created a global public square where extreme content travels faster than truth, and they have done too little to protect the people who use them. When Reuters reached out for comment, Discord, Google, Meta, X, Telegram, and TikTok did not immediately respond. That silence is telling. It suggests that the companies are not sure how to answer the accusation that they have been silent allies to Russian operations. The European Union’s Digital Services Act already provides a legal framework for accountability, and Poland is clearly ready to use every available tool.
Meanwhile, the physical side of information warfare has become visible in a striking way. Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted that Russian bot activity on social media dropped after Ukraine launched long-range drone strikes on Yandex data centers. The attacks hit facilities in Sasovo in the Ryazan region, Kaluga, and the Vladimir region between October 8 and October 11. According to available data, automated traffic from Yandex’s network fell close to zero by October 11. It is impossible to conclude from that alone whether Russian propaganda operations were directly affected, but the correlation is powerful. Disinformation is not ethereal. It requires servers, power, cooling, bandwidth, and engineers. Bots are not ghosts; they are programs running in data centers. When those centers are hit, the bots go quiet. This is a reminder that the information war is not only about narratives; it is also about infrastructure. For Poland, which cannot strike data centers in Russia, the lesson is clear: cooperation from private platforms is the only peaceful lever left. The same technology that connects families and friends can be weaponized by intelligence services. In a modern conflict, a drone strike on a data center can be more effective than a cyberattack, but democracies should not have to rely on drones to silence Russian lies. They need rules, independent enforcement, and public trust.
At its core, Poland’s warning is a defense of the human ability to make sense of the world. It is easy to see this as another regulatory fight between governments and tech giants, but it affects everyone. It affects the teacher who sees a manipulated video of the prime minister, the young voter unsure whether election results can be trusted, the mother reading headlines designed to make her fear refugees, the soldier’s family trying to navigate a storm of propaganda while the war rages nearby. When disinformation is allowed to spread, people make decisions based on falsehoods. They vote against their interests, distrust life-saving vaccines, send hatred to their neighbors, and reject shared facts. The demand for Polish-speaking moderation is a demand for context and culture, for treating citizens as human beings rather than engagement metrics. The threat of financial penalties is a message that there are consequences for allowing a hostile state to use private infrastructure as a psychological warfare weapon. No single country can solve this problem alone, but Poland’s firm stance could push Europe to act more boldly. Perhaps the platforms will listen. Perhaps they will only respond to fines. But the fight is not only in boardrooms; it is in every mind that opens a social media feed and tries to separate truth from manipulation. Supporting independent journalism, paying for credible news, teaching media literacy, and demanding transparent algorithms are all acts of resistance. Poland’s warning on October 21 was not just a legal threat; it was a call to recognize that information is a battlefield, and that the silence of the bots is possible only if democracies refuse to stay silent themselves.