Associated Incidents
A wave of AI-generated videos on TikTok promoting Poland's departure from the European Union is a deliberate campaign to probe how its election in 2027 can be influenced, Warsaw's junior digital minister told POLITICO.
Videos of young women in patriotic dress delivering far-right messages and calling on Poland to leave the EU surfaced and quickly gained traction on TikTok in late December.
Poland's State Secretary for Digital Affairs Dariusz Standerski said in an interview that he believed the videos were "tests for the narratives before the election" scheduled for 2027, when Poles elect a new parliament.
"I believe that some actors in this area want to check which kind of contents will be spread more easily than another," he said. Disinformation campaigns typically zone in on a couple of hot-button issues in what security experts say are efforts to divide societies and increase political tensions.
The government has not yet established who was behind the campaign promoting "Polexit," Standerski said, adding it would be part of an investigation led by the European Commission. The EU executive --- prompted by a Dec. 29 letter from the Polish junior minister --- said it will examine TikTok's compliance with the bloc's content moderation law, the Digital Services Act.
We "know in which interest [it] is to divide Polish society," Standerski said, referring to the "far east," but adding that it's too soon to say definitively who was behind the campaign.
A survey from December by United Surveys for the Wirtualna Polska website found that support for a Polish exit from the EU --- while still relatively low --- has shifted from the far right toward the center right.
TikTok said in an earlier statement that it's "in contact with Polish authorities and the European Commission and [has] removed content where it violates" platform rules. It did not respond to a new request for comment.
Standerski said the company had been "very cooperative" and had quickly removed the content, but wants the Commission to determine how the videos came to be on the platform in the first place.