The Polish Government, at the request of the European Commission, has presented a plan for monitoring and intervention in online activities during the run-up to the presidential election due in May.
The move followed recent revelations that the Commissioner for Digital Affairs Henna Virkkunen was planning to organise a roundtable ahead of the election to discuss possible threats to the electoral process in Poland.
According to portal Niezależna.pl on March 13, a meeting of the European Digital Services Council, an advisory body of digital service co-ordinators from European Union member states and the EC set up under the auspices of the Digital Services Act (DSA), had already taken place on February 19.
Poland was represented at that meeting by the Office of Electronic Communications (UKE), which presented information on the election protection programmme called “Election Umbrella”.
Under the DSA, the EC holds supervisory authority over very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large search engines (VLSEs) with these entities being required to mitigate the risks of actual or foreseeable negative impacts on electoral processes.
Not waiting for any EU roundtable on Poland’s presidential election, the digital affairs ministry together with the Polish Research and Academic Computer Network (NASK) have initiated discussions with social media platforms to streamline the handling of misinformation reports.
According to Niezależna’s report, the social media platforms have committed to prioritising such reports during the election period and to hold regular discussions on electoral disinformation. That was designed to ensure compliance with the DSA’s provisions that oblige EU-based platform owners to ensure user safety and to remove “harmful contents and misinformation”.
The ministry and NASK have established a monitoring system for social media platforms including X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Telegram, as well as a system for verifying online content.
Additional measures, according to the ministry’s website, included “identifying electoral disinformation and activities of deceptive influencers, monitoring the violations of curfew on the weekend of the election, mapping influencer funding and launching tools such as domain security scans and password breach notifications”.
The ministry and NASK will be responsible for reporting inappropriate content and processing reports from citizens. The internal security agency (ABW) will identify vulnerabilities to cyberattacks and warn the State election regulator (PKW) of techniques that may be used by foreign intelligence services in disrupting the election process.
Poland’s broadcasting regulator (KRRiTV), aligned to the opposition Conservatives (PiS), on March 12 rejected the EU’s proposal to hold a roundtable on the presidential election. It stated: “Any attempt by international institutions to interfere in the electoral process undermines the fundamental principles of democracy and national sovereignty of a member state”.
It added that the KRRiTV disagreed with the EC view that “free and fair elections could be threatened by content recommendation systems and the very content disseminated by online platforms”.
The PiS has criticised the idea of holding the roundtable, seeing it as interference in Poland’s internal affairs and a possible precursor for what it called “the Romanian scenario”. That was in reference to making allegations about online interference that could later be used to annul the election if the results were not to the liking of the EC aligned centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
PiS MEP Adam Bielan, told reporters on March 13 that the EC was biased against the Polish Right and favoured Tusk’s candidate Rafał Trzaskowski.
“The Commissioner [Henna Virkkunen-ed.] is a politician who, five years ago, actively supported the campaign of one particular candidate — then and now — Rafał Trzaskowski,” Bielan said.
“She is absolutely biased and completely unreliable when it comes to investigating foreign influences in Poland’s election campaign.”
He also claimed there was evidence of foreign governments and organisations having interfered in Poland’s 2023 parliamentary election that brought Tusk to power.
“We have information regarding the activities of Russian intelligence services (GRU) aimed at undermining PiS. Russian agents in Poland actively worked to dissuade Polish citizens from voting for PiS,” he said, referring to the the fact that a number of those who worked for Russian groups were recently convicted by the courts.
Bielan added: “NGOs funded by American and European sources, including organisations linked to [US philanthropist] George Soros, ran so-called ‘voter turnout campaigns’, based on advertisements designed to discourage voting for PiS.”
He claimed that represented a “peculiar coalition of far-left NGOs and Russians working against PiS in 2023 with the EC remaining silent on the matter”.
