Poland
Traditional news brands play a weaker role in Poland’s social media ecosystem, where some individual personalities accrue as many mentions as large news organisations, and where legacy anchors are notoriously absent among the most mentioned individuals. The most influential accounts are a distinctly varied mix of news, investigation, commentary, satire, specialism, and lifestyle. Many of the individuals mentioned are not overtly political or politically aligned, but when it comes to politics (political commentators and politicians) the most mentioned names skew conservative.
At the top of the list, Łukasz Bok is a breaking-news curator who built one of Poland’s biggest social news-related presences. He created Katastrofy i Konflikty Światowe (KiKŚ) as a teenager in 2013 to track conflicts, disasters, and major events. KiKŚ now exists across several platforms, breaking 1m followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X, with feeds consisting of rapid, source-linked updates.
Krzysztof Stanowski exemplifies the rise of platform-centred, personality-driven news: after making his name as a sports journalist with traditional media, he launched Kanał Zero in 2024, which despite being a new entrant to the market also appears at the top of the most mentioned brands on social media.
Though Stanowski is one of its primary hosts, Kanał Zero now operates as a multi-host, YouTube-native newsroom with daily long-form interviews, investigations, and live discussion. Stanowski himself has become one of Poland’s most visible media figures, even staging a self-described satirical presidential bid in 2025 to ‘show what elections look like from the inside’. He has also been criticised for his combative tone on X, including the use of direct insults.
At the younger end of the spectrum, Mikołaj ‘Konopskyy’ Tylko has grown a large audience by scrutinising influencer behaviour and online scandals, positioning himself as a watchdog within the creator economy. Meanwhile, Piotr Zychowicz’s Historia Realna stands out as a specialist explainer/interview channel, turning military history, geopolitics, and security into long-form conversations that perform strongly on YouTube. A former deputy editor-in-chief of the conservative liberal weekly Do Rzeczy, Zychowicz is often quoted by media sympathising with the Polish right-of-centre.
Meme- and humour-led brands have a wide appeal among Polish audiences too. Make Life Harder packages news and pop culture as shareable, ironic posts that travel fast on Instagram, while visual satirists like Michał Marszał draw attention around big news moments with image-led riffs that often go viral. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this content sometimes bleeds into the political, as in ORB, a YouTube-native channel fronted by Bartek Urbaniak with punchy videos about current politics.
On the overtly political side, conservative columnist Rafał Ziemkiewicz and right-leaning commentator Witold Gadowski use their YouTube channels for weekly monologues and interviews, while Prime Minister Donald Tusk uses his social media presence for official communication and crisis management. Sławomir Mentzen, from the right-wing alliance Konfederacja, has mastered short-form videos on TikTok and YouTube to reach younger voters. Meanwhile, Wojciech Cejrowski bridges legacy and social media, building on his long-running travel brand (which remains on television), while much of his online output is now current affairs and political talk.
As in most countries, we find a stark gender imbalance in Poland. The majority of the most mentioned individuals are men, and the sole woman on the list is Anna Lewandowska, a lifestyle and fitness entrepreneur, highlighting the absence of women from the political sphere.
Proportion that regularly pay attention to creators/influencers in social and video networks
24%
(13/24)
Proportion that regularly pay attention to news brands/journalists in social and video networks
25%
(15/24)
Gender balance
14
of the top 15 individuals are men
These lists represent the individuals most mentioned by respondents to our 2025 and 2024 Digital News Report surveys in the context of news and social media and video networks. Respondents who used Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok for news were asked where they paid most attention – including options for traditional news media/journalists, digital-first news outlets not associated with traditional media, creators/personalities who mostly focus on the news, creators/personalities who occasionally focus on the news. For each type, we asked respondents to name up to three examples of who they paid attention to. We then counted the individuals mostly using a tool called OpenRefine to help us use a semi-automated approach to clean the data (e.g. resolve misspellings or alternative names, remove duplicates etc.). In parallel, we also used ChatGPT5 to process and recode the original data, and to identify the most mentioned individuals to give us a way of comparing results. Further details on the tools we used and on small differences in methodology between 2024 and 2025 are provided in our methodology section (link).
Why did you use open fields rather than closed lists to collect the data?
We used open text response boxes, first, because in many countries the most popular news creators and influencers have not yet been identified by previous research. Second, because it would likely not be possible to fully capture the broad and fragmented nature of this ecosystem using a fixed listed of response options. And third, because we wanted to adopt an audience-centric approach whereby respondents could enter names that they considered news sources to them, even if they did not meet accepted standards or definitions within academia or the journalistic profession. This means that many of the names we list here would perhaps have been excluded under a more top-down approach.
How definitive is the order of the named individuals in each country?
In some cases, especially near the bottom the list, differences in the number of mentions for individuals are very small. Given our survey methodology, and the associated margin of error, the precise rank order should be read as indicative rather than definitive. Many other individuals were mentioned by respondents in the context of news, even if they do not make the top 15 using our approach. The lists should therefore be seen as indicative of some of the top news individuals in each country.
Why are some popular individuals with high follower counts lower down the list than individuals with high follower counts?
There are a number of possible reasons for this. First, some popular creators such as musicians and comedians are known more for entertainment than for news and their follower counts are often higher as a result. This means that even if they do occasionally talk about news related issues, not all of their followers will be aware of it. Second, some individuals working for traditional media may have relatively low personal followings but are widely distributed via social accounts of news brands. Third, there is a margin of error in surveys such as this (see previous answer) that needs to be borne in mind.
Did you exclude any individuals or other entries as part of the process?
Our lists are inclusive in terms of being faithful to the individual names mentioned by respondents. We removed just a handful of actors, sports stars, and celebrities if we were sure they did not post on any news-related issues. In most cases this did not affect the top 15 names that are published in this report for each country.
Many creators operate as part of collectives or use pseudonyms. How did you deal with these categorisation issues?
In terms of creator collectives or social-first brands, such as the Daily Wire (US) or TLDR News (UK) we followed the lead of our respondents. Where audiences have identified them as individuals, we have tended to categorise these as creators rather than news brands, but where they have mentioned a brand, we included them in our list of news brands. Where it was clear, however, that the brand is the work of one individual (e.g. Es.decirdiario/Sheila Hernández in Spain) we categorised them as an individual and made the connection clear in the description. Many creators use pseudonyms and, in these cases, we combined mentions of these with the real names. Again, we tried to make the connection clear in the description.
How did you deal with politicians and the overlap between politicians and political commentary?
Politicians and businesspeople are also frequently mentioned by survey respondents in the context of news sources on social media, and often have significant followings (e.g. on X, Donald Trump has 109m, Narendra Modi 109m, and Elon Musk 225m). Many politicians are also content creators and commentators who shape public debates. Some content creators have become politicians, and vice versa. We chose to include politicians if they were named by respondents in the context of news, but we have also shaded serving (or recently serving) politicians in grey to make clear the different relationship they often have with news consumers.