Poland Content Blocking Law Lands on the President's Desk

The Poland content blocking law is now sitting on President Karol Nawrocki's desk, and it could decide how fast officials can pull posts offline in one of the EU's biggest countries. Parliament finished its work on October 23, according to Reclaim The Net, handing the president a bill he already rejected once.

What the bill actually does

The act is the second Polish law written to carry out the EU's Digital Services Act, the bloc's rulebook for online platforms. It creates a national procedure for official orders that block illegal content, covering threats, hate speech and material seen as harmful to children.

The power would sit with the head of the telecoms regulator UKE and, for video platforms, the chairman of the broadcasting council KRRiT. Requests can come from prosecutors, police, the tax administration, copyright holders and ordinary internet users, according to Reclaim The Net.

UKE is supposed to issue an order only when the evidence leaves no doubt that the content is illegal. The officials handling requests must not belong to a political party or publicly display political views.

How fast the takedowns could move

In certain cases, decisions can be enforced immediately, to stop harmful material from spreading further. A user who posted the flagged content would normally get two days to respond, but the Senate cut that to twenty-four hours for immediate-enforcement cases.

If a site keeps hosting the content or ignores an order, its domain goes onto a special UKE register. Internet providers then have forty-eight hours to remove it from the systems that translate domain names into addresses.

The Senate also widened the fast track. Cases where police or prosecutors ask to block content that may break article 119 of the Criminal Code, which covers violence or unlawful threats over race, religion or political affiliation, can now be enforced right away and are handled by regulators instead of courts.

Why the president vetoed it before

This is not the first round. In January Nawrocki vetoed the earlier version, saying he could not sign a bill that amounts to administrative censorship. He compared an official deciding what is allowed online to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984.

The government split the blocking powers into a separate bill after that veto. A first DSA law, signed in September, already divided oversight between UKE, KRRiT and the consumer watchdog UOKiK, according to Learning Zone.

On October 15 the president said he has nothing against eliminating sites where children have been harmed. He added that a law aimed at removing specific views from social media is unacceptable to him.

The government's case: platforms ignore reports

Ministers point to numbers. Deputy digital minister Pawel Olszewski said that in the first half of 2026, platforms removed only about four thousand of roughly sixty-five thousand reported items, according to Learning Zone.

Deputy digital minister Dariusz Standerski put it bluntly: the internet cannot be a space where perpetrators feel unpunished. Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said he is counting on a signature because citizens need more effective protection online.

The vote count shows broad support in parliament. The Sejm passed the bill on October 8 by two hundred forty-two votes to sixty-one, with one hundred thirty-six abstentions. An attempt to strip the hate speech category failed, with only forty-five members backing it.

What to watch next

Critics note that the law offers no appeal to the regulator itself. A party may file an objection within fourteen days, which means going to a common court. That is the same mechanism Nawrocki called an absurd substitute for real judicial review.

The president can sign it, veto it again or send it to the Constitutional Tribunal. If it becomes law, it takes effect after a three-month wait. Either way, the fight is part of a wider European argument over who polices speech online. Follow more on our politics coverage and tech coverage.

For Gen Z users in Poland, who live on the platforms this law targets, the stakes are practical: faster removal of scams and abuse on one side, and fears of overreach on the other. The next signature, or veto, will settle which side wins this round.