TikTok's Polish Elections Labels: Only Sometimes, And Only For Some
Systematic failures applying election-information labels during Poland's 2025 presidential election; 20M+ Polish diaspora users were excluded from labels while fraud allegations and AI disinformation spread unlabeled.
Executive summary
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AI Forensics investigated TikTok's application of European Commission-mandated election-information labels during Poland's 2025 presidential election, using a non-personalized account geolocated to Poland via VPN, snowball sampling to identify accounts spreading election-fraud allegations, and the 4CAT toolkit to track posting and labeling patterns across more than 1,200 posts and a close qualitative review of 23 fraud-related videos.
The analysis found that election labels appeared inconsistently and were missing from most relevant political content, and that labels were visible only to accounts physically located in Poland — excluding an estimated 20 million members of the Polish diaspora tested across the US, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, and the UK. Nearly 80% of posts spreading fraud allegations, which together drew more than 4.5 million views, lacked required labeling, and four videos using generative AI imagery carried no AI-disclosure label.
The report concludes that TikTok's inconsistent enforcement of its own election-integrity commitments left large diaspora audiences and fraud-related misinformation effectively unlabeled during a competitive national election.
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