6 years in court fighting against arbitrary censorship. What about user empowerment promised by the DSA?

In March 2024, the District Court in Warsaw ruled that Meta Ireland Inc. must restore the pages and content published by the Polish CSO, Civil Drug Policy Initiative (SIN), on Instagram and Facebook. Despite the court's decision, Meta appealed, and one year later, the content remains unavailable.

These pages had been unjustifiably removed by the company in 2018. Regardless of the final court judgment, this case highlights the urgent need for Poland to implement the DSA. Without its enforcement, users of the largest social media platforms — whether private individuals or CSOs — still stand little chance against the dominance of tech giants.

SIN vs Facebook case page

Tech corporations such as Meta exploit their dominant position to impose what their users may or may not publish. The case of SIN illustrates that they also strive to unilaterally determine the terms for resolving content moderation disputes, including the choice of language and jurisdiction.

Censorship by social media platforms affects a wide range of individuals and groups, including politicians, artists, journalists, or civil society organisations. Among these is SIN, an organisation dedicated to drug education and harm reduction, which, supported by Panoptykon, has spent 6 years in court to recover its accounts and groups it operated on Facebook and Instagram. Meta blocked the channels without prior warning or explanation, effectively cutting SIN off from the people it aims to help.

6 years in court against private censorship

The first instance court agreed with SIN: by blocking content without explanation and the right to effectively contest the decision, Meta has infringed on the organization’s personal rights.

Meta has challenged the judgment, arguing primarily that the Polish court lacks jurisdiction over the case. It says that according to its terms of service all disputes concerning Polish users should be taken to Ireland.

The first instance court has already ruled against it. First, it clarified that the terms of service (which refer disputes to Ireland) were introduced after the SIN’s content had been blocked and therefore cannot be effectively applied to this case (in March 2018, when the platform removed SIN’s pages and groups, the earlier version of Facebook's regulations was in effect, which referred to… the jurisdiction of courts in the USA).

Secondly, the case is about personal rights infringement and – according to EU law and judgements of the Court of Justice of the EU – personal rights disputes may be taken to the court of the place where the infringement took place – Poland in this case.

Thirdly, the clause sending all the disputes to Ireland is “unfair”. While a multinational corporation has the resources to hire legal representation anywhere in the world, an individual user—or even an organization—would face significant disadvantages if required to resolve disputes abroad, navigating a foreign language and an unfamiliar legal system.

Meta has ca. 20 million users on Facebook and ca. 16 million on Instagram in Poland. Is it really unreasonable to expect the corporation to take accountability for its action within Poland?

Blocked by Facebook? In Poland that’s your problem

Digital Service Act, a new regulation adopted in the European Union in 2022, was meant to empower user rights against Very Large Online Platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram. The new law is clear: a platform must provide an explanation why the content was blocked and provide users with a practical way to challenge these decisions. If it fails to do so, a complaint may be submitted through the national Digital Service Coordinator (DSC). Users could also appeal to the out-of- court-court dispute settlement bodies certified by the national DSCs.

That’s the law. And the practice? As we continue to receive complaints from individuals about excessive content removals, it is clear that Meta has yet to comply with the new legal requirements. When blocking users, it continues to provide only a generic justification and offers limited options for users to effectively appeal the decision within its platforms. In Poland, however, users have nowhere to file complaints because, as of April 2025, the Polish government has failed to implement the DSA, despite the deadline having passed in February 2024. As a result, Poland remains the only EU Member State that has yet to designate a DSC. The absence of a DSC also means that no out-of-court dispute settlement institutions have been established in Poland, as there is no national authority in place to certify them first.

In addition, the SIN vs. Facebook judgment has spurred the Polish government to propose a new external oversight mechanism for reviewing platform content removal decisions. While the case opens the door to judicial redress in Poland for challenging arbitrary and opaque content moderation practices before national courts, it also exposes the drawbacks of judicial proceedings as a viable remedy—namely, their high costs and lengthy duration. Accordingly, the proposed law implementing the DSA in Poland would empower the President of the Office for Electronic Communications, who is expected to also serve as the DSC in the future, with additional authority to address individual disputes over content moderation between users and platforms. This would include the ability to mandate the restoration of unjustifiably removed content within days of receiving a complaint. While it sounds promising, this procedure too remains, for now, under legislative review.

At Panoptykon, we are overwhelmed by emails from individuals seeking assistance in reclaiming their lives or businesses which have been disrupted after being blocked by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc. Full of hope when the DSA was adopted, now we struggle with growing frustration. Despite these individuals holding rights, Poland still lacks a functional procedure to effectively and promptly execute them.Hopefully, this will soon change, ensuring that platforms can no longer disregard the law. In the meantime, we will continue our efforts alongside SIN in the appeal court to ensure that the positive outcome of the case achieved thus far is upheld in the final judgment.