Poland’s main opposition party, the conservatives of Law and Justice, (PiS), have accused the state’s cybersecurity agency (NASK) of dragging its heels investigating allegations of foreign interference in the country’s presidential campaign with a series of attack ads on Facebook.
Political advertisements placed by two accounts on the Meta-owned social media platform that outspent limits of any official committee attacked leading opposition candidates Karol Nawrocki of the PiS and the Confederation party’s Sławomir Mentzen, while supporting Rafał Trzaskowski, the candidate from the Polish prime minister’s centre-left Civic Coalition (KO).
Former PiS digital affairs minister Janusz Cieszyński criticised NASK for “taking action so late in the day, weeks after concerns were raised over the Facebook accounts, and for not making clear in its statement that Trzaskowski was the beneficiary of the adverts”.
As PiS awaited action from NASK, party MPs Paweł Jabłoński and Michał Moskal, put pressure on the agency at a press conference where they raised concerns about the two Facebook accounts and called on the justice and interior ministers to take action.
“We are raising the alarm that, behind Rafał Trzaskowski’s campaign, there are companies associated with foreign entities, whose activity bears the hallmarks of an organised disinformation operation,” said Moskal.
In a statement released on May 14, the NASK Centre for Disinformation Analysis said it had identified political ads on Facebook that may have been funded from abroad and were visible to users across Poland.
“The advertising accounts involved in the campaign spent more on political content in the last seven days than any electoral committee,” the agency wrote in a post on X.
NASK analysts warned this could be a deliberate provocation aimed at harming the candidate seemingly being supported, while destabilising the campaign more broadly. The agency asked Meta to block the accounts involved and referred the case to Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW).
However, NASK’s claim that the Facebook posts had been taken down was denied by Meta which said they had disappeared because the advertising period had expired. NASK added that Meta had accepted the request for the posts in question to be blocked.
NASK did not provide any details regarding the content of the adverts it had identified as potential foreign-funded election interference, nor their source. However, both OKO.press, a liberal portal, and Niezależna, a conservative news service, have both identified the source as Wiesz Jak Nie Jest (You Know How It Isn’t) and Stół Dorosłych (Adults’ Table), which have been buying political adverts on Facebook that attack Nawrocki and Mentzen and promote promoting Trzaskowski.
OKO.press notes that Wiesz Jak Nie Jest initially featured criticism of Mentzen, the candidate of the right-wing Confederation party, before switching to similar videos attacking Nawrocki after support for Mentzen declined in the polls. Stół Dorosłych, meanwhile, has promoted posts praising Trzaskowski.
Over the last 30 days, Wiesz Jak Nie Jest has spent almost €68,000 on promoting such ads, while Stół Dorosłych has spent more than €35,000.
Polish journalists Szymon and Patryk Słowik of the portal wp.pl have linked the posts to the liberal Akcja Demokracja foundation and an Austro-Hungarian company, Estratos, an affiliate of the Hungarian left, which governed that country before Viktor Orbán’s time and specialised in supporting progressive causes with digital services and online campaigning.
Meta denied allegations of foreign meddling, stating that “anybody who wants to run ads on our platforms related to social issues, elections or politics must go through a verification process to prove their identity and that they live in the country they are running the ads in”. The company said that its investigation had “confirmed that the admin associated with these pages is authentic and based in Poland”.
The Polish opposition Conservatives (PiS) have accused the country’s security services of leaking information from the files of Karol Nawrocki, the party’s presidential candidate, to discredit him. https://t.co/vMV7cbJ0g6
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) May 5, 2025
