What about this election disinformation? NASK will publish a report, but only after the second round

NASK, a state institution tasked with tracking disinformation online, is preparing a report on disinformation before the elections. It is to be a summary of analyses conducted so far by the Disinformation Analysis Center, which deals with this issue.

As we are informed by the public relations and external communications team, the report will not be ready until June, after the presidential elections .

"Possible interference in the campaign". NASK does not disclose details

NASK has not yet published the details of any of the research conducted by analysts on pre-election disinformation. However, on the basis of one of them, on May 14, the institution issued a warning about a possible attempt to interfere in the election campaign.

A day later, Wirtualna Polska published the results of a journalistic investigation, which showed that the Facebook profiles "Stół dorosłych" and "Wiesz jak nie jest" were running a smear campaign against Sławomir Mentzen and Karol Nawrocki, while at the same time supporting Rafał Trzaskowski. According to data provided by the Meta company, an anonymous administrator spent PLN 420,000 on them.

According to journalists, members of the Democracy Action association and the Austrian company Estratos Gmbh played a significant role in the campaign. It is run by Hungarian politicians and has financial connections to the American organization Action for Democracy. A few days later, the Demagog Association revealed that similar campaigns were also run by the same entity in Spain.

In the CIS, we described another activity in which Estratos was also involved – a campaign in which influencers were offered remuneration in exchange for posting political content.

- Everything indicates that we are dealing with illegal financing of Rafał Trzaskowski's campaign - commented PiS MP Mariusz Błaszczak at a press conference called after the publication of the reports and announced that the case would be reported to the prosecutor's office.

NASK has findings, but the report was only shown to the ministry

Radosław Nielek, director of NASK, assured during a specially convened session of the parliamentary digitization committee to clarify the matter , that the institution had similar findings to the journalists, and the matter had been transferred to the ABW. However, the institution refuses to disclose the full report, which would show which profiles were in question, when the alert was raised about potential interference in the elections and what connections analysts discovered.

The preliminary analyst report on the attempted interference in the presidential election campaign was developed on May 7. On May 8 and 9, the information collected in the report was verified and checked in NASK. On May 9, NASK informed the Internal Security Agency about the detected anomalies in the operational cooperation mode and sent the report to the Ministry of Digital Affairs in the afternoon. NASK reports are forwarded to the Ministry of Digital Affairs with the designation internal document TLP: AMBER+STRICT - it was reported.

The CIS has been asking for the content of the document since May 15 - the internal marking is not a confidentiality clause that would exclude the obligation to disclose it under the Act on Access to Public Information.

"NASK prepares reports as part of tasks commissioned by the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and it is the Ministry that receives and administers the reports. It is also the Ministry that decides on their possible disclosure. Throughout the year, NASK monitors and analyzes thousands of different accounts and profiles in social media, which is documented in the form of reports," we read in the correspondence received from NASK.

So we asked the Ministry of Digital Affairs for a report. No response.

New reports of disinformation online

Meanwhile, on May 28, the TVN24 portal published further reports from NASK. The journalists wrote that they had obtained analyses that identified the activity of CitizenGO, an international organization linked to Russian oligarchs. "Its ads first promoted Sławomir Mentzen and Grzegorz Braun, and now Karol Nawrocki," writes TVN24.

However, unlike in the case of the previous campaign, there was no official NASK statement on this matter. So we asked for the analysis cited by the station's journalists to be made available as well.

"NASK did not provide the report/fragments of the report to TVN24 journalists, and does not comment on the veracity of the statements contained in the article or the entities indicated by the journalists. If NASK finds possible violations of the law, it notifies the relevant state services. If there are important issues to be reported in this or another case, NASK will publish an appropriate statement," we read in the response.

WP reported on Friday afternoon that the report described by TVN from NASK had been leaked. "Krzysztof Gawkowski ordered the initiation of urgent control activities aimed at determining whether the document could have been forwarded outside by anyone from NASK or MC," the portal writes.