ELECTION REPORT Assessment of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in the 2025 Polish Presidential Election

The report identifies a persistent FIMI landscape in Poland, characterized by Russian and Belarusian operations targeting Ukrainian refugees, the EU, and democratic institutions. It highlights the use of coordinated inauthentic behavior, AI-generated content, and content laundering to amplify polarizing narratives. While public resilience and civil society interventions limited the impact, the report notes significant platform failures—particularly on X, Meta, and TikTok—and a regulatory vacuum due to the absence of a permanent Digital Services Coordinator in Poland.

• The FIMI landscape in Poland is driven by several persistent vulnerabilities, including the country's geopolitical opposition to Russia, the weaponization of the Belarusian border crisis, and deep-seated domestic political polarization.
• Three primary meta-narratives were used to destabilize the election: anti-Ukrainian narratives (the largest category), anti-EU narratives aimed at eroding trust in European institutions, and anti-establishment narratives designed to delegitimize democratic governance.
• Sophisticated coordinated operations, including Doppelganger, Operation Overload, the Pravda Network, and Radio Belarus, disseminated misleading content and promoted ideologically aligned candidates.
• Domestic political actors, particularly from the far-right and conservative-nationalist spectrum, engaged in unfair conduct, including the use of fake personas for self-promotion and the spread of false information about election procedures.
• Major social media platforms exhibited systemic risks: X lacked adequate account creation checks, Meta had weak 'Know Your Customer' (KYC) checks for ads, and TikTok showed inconsistent enforcement of political campaigning policies.
• The report identifies a critical regulatory gap in Poland due to the absence of a permanent Digital Services Coordinator (DSC), which hinders the effective implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA).
• FIMI operations utilized advanced manipulative techniques, such as AI-generated text and 'cheap fakes' (deceptively edited images), to create synthetic realities and erode trust in digital evidence.
• Content laundering was used to bypass EU sanctions, with websites like Lega Artis and the Pravda Network republishing machine-translated content from sanctioned Russian state media.
• The impact of FIMI was constrained by public resilience, active civil society responses, and the limited operational sophistication of some campaigns, though the threat landscape remained consistent with previous elections in 2017 and 2021.

APA

Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2025). ELECTION REPORT Assessment of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in the 2025 Polish Presidential Election. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FDEI-Polish-Election-Country-Report-2025.pdf

Chicago

Institute for Strategic Dialogue. ELECTION REPORT Assessment of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in the 2025 Polish Presidential Election. 2025. https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FDEI-Polish-Election-Country-Report-2025.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Institute for Strategic Dialogue |title=ELECTION REPORT Assessment of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in the 2025 Polish Presidential Election |date=2025 |url=https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FDEI-Polish-Election-Country-Report-2025.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{instituteforstrategicdialogue2025election, author = {{Institute for Strategic Dialogue}}, title = {{ELECTION REPORT Assessment of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in the 2025 Polish Presidential Election}}, institution = {Institute for Strategic Dialogue}, year = {2025}, url = {https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FDEI-Polish-Election-Country-Report-2025.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }