Kraków shooting: Russian-linked bots and fake news flood social media

After the armed attack in Kraków, Polish disinformation specialists reported more than 2,000 accounts to social media administrators for spreading false versions of what happened. Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs announced this on Sunday, saying the profiles include bots as well as dozens of pages with Russian-language traces.

According to the ministry, a team from NASK’s Disinformation Analysis Center passed the accounts that had posted unreliable narratives to platform operators for moderation. Some of them are automated bots operating in several languages, primarily Polish, English, French and Dutch. Several dozen more profiles communicate directly in Russian, have Cyrillic in their names or descriptions, or contain links to the Russian Federation.

“The attack was orchestrated by the authorities and the EU”

The most widespread lie was the claim that the attack was planned by the Polish government with the involvement of the European Union. The ministry says that once other versions had run out of steam in the first hours after the shooting, this fake reached a very wide audience: up to 200 million views. The ministry noted that the narrative plays on the negative attitude of some groups toward the EU, and stressed how absurd it is.

Another claim, that the authorities staged the attack to justify cancelling the nationalist Independence March scheduled for 11 November, drew about 5.6 million views. After the events in Kraków, Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated outright that the government does not intend to ban the march.

A soldier, a Ukrainian and a “second shooter”

The version that the gunman was a soldier gained about 18 million views in a single day. Poland’s Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz categorically denied it: the attacker never had any connection to the Polish army.

The claim that the police were late to respond because they were busy with protests outside the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw drew up to 14 million views the following day. According to Minister Kierwiński, police opened fire on the attacker roughly three minutes after the first report.

Another version said the shooter was a Ukrainian or a mercenary fighting on the side of the Ukrainian army. It appeared in Belarusian media and in pro-Kremlin Russian-language Telegram channels such as Shot. It was based on a patch showing the historic pirate flag of Edward Teach. According to the Polish investigative outlet Oko.Press, the patch is worn informally by various armed groups around the world, and anyone can buy it.

A few hours after the attack, a report also emerged of a second shooter on the roof of St. Mary’s Basilica in Kraków; one such post on X gained a million views. Radio Kraków reported that the video does show emergency services reacting as they tried to identify a person on the roof, but according to Lesser Poland police, the cause was a priest who had stepped out onto the terrace at that moment. The second-shooter claim was not confirmed.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz