Disinformation about wind energy in Poland now operates at industrial scale and produces physical, not just online, consequences, speakers told a Warsaw press conference, presenting figures on both the volume of false content and its impact on companies.
The Institute for Media Monitoring counted nearly 70,000 disinformation publications about energy in Polish media between 2022 and 2025 — full media articles, not only social posts — generating more than 1.2bn audience contacts. On average, an adult in Poland could have encountered such content about 37 times, and roughly one in five energy-related messages circulating online is likely false, the conference heard.
Speakers also detailed how cheaply artificial outrage can be manufactured. According to NATO StratCom figures cited at the event, EUR 168 buys around 1,200 comments, more than 6,000 likes and close to 16,000 views. In October last year, Europol and a Latvian counter-terrorism unit dismantled an operation that fed 49m fake accounts from a single flat, using numbers registered in more than 80 countries; the oldest such ‘troll farm’, near St Petersburg, has operated for years.
A study carried out with the Polish Wind Energy Association (PSEW), presented by disinformation expert Katarzyna Bakowicz, put the business impact in stark terms. Seventy per cent of surveyed Polish wind-energy firms reported disinformation attacks — fake news, false social posts and reviews, phishing and cyber-attacks — and 70 per cent said it had a real effect on the schedule or cost of their projects. One in four reported acts of physical violence linked to false content, including property damage, attacks on employees and blocked investments.
Some 58 per cent of firms called disinformation one of the key barriers to the sector’s development, with a further 38 per cent describing it as significant. Bakowicz noted that companies also named competitors among the authors of disinformation, and warned that ‘non-media’ misinformation — passed by word of mouth — is often what mobilises local opposition to projects. The cost, speakers concluded, lands in lost jobs, lost municipal taxes and higher energy bills.
