WARSAW: Just ahead of Poland's parliamentary elections on Sunday, households across the country have been receiving a glossy pamphlet showing a group of migrants crowded onto a rubber dinghy at sea.
“Invasion! They’re coming! Say ‘No’ to the influx of illegal immigrants into Poland,“ reads the pamphlet, aimed at influencing voters for a referendum being held on the same day as the elections.
The migration referendum has been called by the eurosceptic ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has been in power since 2015 and is being challenged by a pro-European centrist opposition.
“This election campaign is drowning in disinformation,“ said Katarzyna Bakowicz, a professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw.
“It’s not disinformation pure and simple, just fake news. It’s half-truths, biased information, manipulation, which are more difficult to pinpoint”.
The same photo of the migrants, which was taken in 2015, is being used in PiS campaign video clips, mixed in with scenes of urban clashes and violence against women.
“The aim is to evoke strong emotions,“ said Anna Mierzynska, a social media analyst.
In an election campaign clip by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, images of migrants arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa are shown in conjunction with attack on a woman, without any context.
Research conducted by AFP found the source of this video, which was an attack in 2016 in the Berlin metro by a Bulgarian national who has since been convicted.
Other campaign images show a terror attack at Zaventem airport in Belgium in 2016 and the expulsion of migrants from Libya to Egypt, also without context.
The same election videos, which have been viewed more than 10 million times on social media, are shown again during news programmes on pro-government state media.
Karina Stasiuk-Krajewska, an expert in media and communication, said the main state channel TVP uses techniques “typical of Russian propaganda in presenting obvious facts as fakes”.
She pointed to one particular instance in which state media underplayed the participation at an anti-government rally in Warsaw on October 1 which drew hundreds of thousands of people.
'Losing their brakes'
The election is close fought and “the end seems to justify the means. Politicians are losing their brakes,“ Mierzynska said.
“In this giant disinformation campaign, all communication channels are affected,“ she said.
“There are no facts or data in the election campaign videos... just manipulation of emotions”.
Stasiuk-Krajewska said that in “a society that is so polarised, disinformation inevitably becomes an excellent tool for boosting emotions”.
And, while experts note the abundance of misinformation from the ruling party, they point out that the liberal opposition is using it too.
The opposition also plays on negative emotions, warning about an imminent exit from the European Union even though the government has repeatedly stated that it wants Poland to stay in the bloc.
Analysts also say that there appears to be little external disinformation in the campaign of the kind that Russia has been accused of in the past.
Mierzynska said Poland had seen “a large influx of different narratives for years: anti-vaccine, anti-immigration, anti-German or anti-European narratives which have become part of public discourse.
“From the point of view of Russia, this is an ideal situation. It does not need to add anything to this, it is filtering through of its own accord,“ she said. - AFP
