Brussels’ Twitter Push Against Conservatives Flops, Study Suggests

Academic research reflects the limited efforts of the EU on social media to bring down PiS in Poland.

A newly published scholarly survey flags up how European Union chiefs made uneven use of Twitter, now X, to bring Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) to heel in their war on national sovereigntist parties.

On the surface, authors Concha Pérez-Curiel, Ricardo Domínguez-García and Rubén Rivas-de-Roca stick to predictable Brussels talking points—a “disinformation wave that fed Euroscepticism”; “the rule of law crisis in Poland”—as one might expect from the peer-reviewed Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies. Yet, perhaps unwittingly, the trio also demonstrates that a high level of public disengagement existed on Polish social media when being addressed by EU chiefs.

Diplomatic and political blackmail were commonplace as part of official efforts to bring down PiS in favour of a more pliable government. However, such threats to Polish sovereignty coincided with a far more slovenly approach to persuading citizens via social media.

The writers found that over a period of six months (April–October 2021), EU leaders and institutions posted a limited number of tweets written to strengthen their authority (or the authority of the so-called rule of law in Poland), prompting a relatively small number of replies (2,280 in total). Reviewing these, the article points darkly to “a prominence … of anonymous or unidentified accounts,” politically close to the line taken by the then PiS government. However, perhaps the bigger story is the lack of public engagement—from any ideological perspective—with Brussels’ announcements on the Twitter platform.

(“The EU political discursive battle against Poland: Disinformation and the rule of law crisis,” Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, Volume 17, Issue 1, 2025, pp. 3-24.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/cjcs_00116_1)