October 8, 2026
The European Union is financing a conference, #Disinfo2026, that delivers an extraordinary rebuke to the Trump administration by claiming the US is engaged in “foreign information manipulation and interference” (FIMI). EU DisinfoLab, a Brussels nonprofit, is holding its annual conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, which began yesterday and continues today. Its program lists a session titled “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back,” and billed three Americans as speakers: Adam Fivenson of American University, the former CIA officer who writes as Alex Finley, and Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
The session description asked, “how did the United States become a FIMI threat for Europe?” A second session, on the Arctic, went further than a question. It promised a discussion of “growing evidence that the United States has, in specific Arctic contexts, operated as a FIMI actor.” Finley and Brooking did not respond to requests for comment.
The EU has given EU DisinfoLab about €1.1 million in research grants on disinformation since 2018. The group received €250,000 from a project called WeVerify that ran from 2018 to 2021. It received €327,500 from vera.ai, a project funded under a call titled “AI to fight disinformation,” and took another €212,500 from a project called ATHENA that runs through October 2026. A fourth grant, of more than €308,000, began in June 2026 and runs to 2029.
The attack on the Trump administration by EU DisinfoLab appears to be part of a larger EU effort to censor social media platforms in general and Elon Musk’s X in particular. The EU has fined X €120 million, about $140 million, under its Digital Services Act. X is appealing the fine.
The United States State Department denounced the conference’s organizers for attacking the United States, which protects most of Europe under the NATO treaty. “We reject that characterization,” a State Department spokesman told Public of the charge that the US is a FIMI threat. “For too long, governments have exploited the pretext of combatting ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ for politically motivated reasons.”
The State Department noted that it has denied visas to Europeans it accuses of censoring Americans. “On December 23, 2025, the Secretary imposed visa restrictions that generally bar five individuals from entering the United States,” the spokesman said. “The Department does not preview potential actions, but the policy announced on May 28, 2025, is global and enforceable wherever the facts warrant.”
Several sponsors of #Disinfo2026 pulled their names off the conference website, including the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic service. “We have decided to have the EEAS logo removed from the material associated with the conference in view of the content of the programme,” an EU spokesperson told Public yesterday. “The organisers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the official positions held by the EU.”
The Lithuanian and Canadian governments similarly distanced themselves. “Upon becoming aware of the above-mentioned discussion topics, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania withdrew from any participation in the conference,” the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Public on October 5. A day later, Andrius Katinas of the Radio and Television Commission of Lithuania, a state regulator, told Public he had withdrawn as a speaker over “the planned discussions concerning the alleged threat posed by the United States.” Global Affairs Canada told Public it had kept its officials at the conference but revised its participation in several panels after what it called changes to their framing.
The withdrawals followed American pressure as well as press questions. “US Ambassador to Lithuania Kara McDonald was involved in the outreach to Vilnius, two US officials said,” reported Raphael Satter and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters, who wrote that the State Department had spent several days lobbying Lithuania, Canada and France.
And some conference participants who Public emailed rejected the conference’s premise. “No. We work with the US government and will continue to do so,” the Centre for Information Resilience, a British group, told Public when asked whether it regards Washington as a source of FIMI. One of the conference’s commercial sponsors was scheduled to run a three-hour workshop on designing counter-campaigns. “Ghost Shift specialises in covert online operations,” the British firm’s website says.
But the EU is still financing the event, the Guardian reported, and the program still lists Beatriz Marín of the EEAS as chair of a panel titled “Prosecuting FIMI,” whose description asks “what would criminal liability for platforms, and their CEOs, look like in practice?” And the program includes a who’s who of censorship activists, including Nina Jankowicz’s group. Jankowicz, who in 2022 led the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board” as its executive director, is listed as “Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer” of the American Sunlight Project.
Her lead researcher, Ben Shultz, was billed on the Arctic panel. “I agree with assessments that the current US administration is a source of FIMI in two precise cases,” Shultz told Public, naming Denmark and Germany.
Other participants actively engage in censorship. Poland’s state research institute NASK told Public it reports content and accounts to platforms, including for “disinformation-related violations.” Josephine Ballon is a leader of the German group HateAid, which Germany’s network regulator certified in 2025 as a “trusted flagger,” a status that gives its reports to social media platforms priority.
And the EU is moving forward with its mass social media censorship-by-NGO proxy strategy. The European Parliament endorsed the Democracy Shield agenda in September in a nonbinding resolution, by 420 votes to 220. The Commission says it will “set up a European Centre for Democratic Resilience,” back a European network of fact-checkers, and write a “crisis protocol” under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s main censorship law.
Meanwhile, the European Commission has not backed off its December 5, 2025 fine of X, its first penalty under the law, citing the design of the blue checkmark, the advertising repository, and researcher access to data. Nor has the EU reversed its sanctioning, ten days later, of Jacques Baud, a 70-year-old former Swiss intelligence officer. The EU’s Official Journal says he acts “as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories.” Baud was sanctioned for what he said and was not charged with a crime. The Council’s grounds include “accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO,” noted Bernhard Wegener on Verfassungsblog, a German constitutional law site.
And today, the second day of the conference, the Council extended the sanctions framework that covers FIMI for another year, “until 9 October 2027,” Eunews reported.
The #Disinfo2026 conference was not only clearly part of that censorship effort but also marked a significant escalation in the EU’s broader war on free speech and its demand to censor Musk’s X in particular. Why is that?
EU Disinformation For Censorship
The Biden administration helped the EU launch FIMI. In June 2021, the Biden administration and the EU pledged in a summit statement “to counter foreign information manipulation and interference.” The EEAS defines FIMI as “a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour.” The definition covers speech that breaks no law. FIMI “does not require the information spread by threat actors to be verifiably false or misleading,” the EEAS wrote in its first threat report, in February 2023.
It’s now clear that the EU’s goal was to silence and censor people in Europe. In May 2025 the Council of the EU sanctioned two German nationals and a Berlin-based journalist, among them the blogger Alina Lipp, on the grounds that she “systematically disseminates misinformation.”
The EU’s strategy was simply to smear disfavored voices as “foreign,” particularly Russian or Chinese, which is the same tactic counterpopulist censorship used since initiating the Russiagate hoax in 2016. “In practice, FIMI risks becoming synonymous with whatever narrative Russia and China put forward,” concluded Lucas Proto, Paula Lamoso-González and Luis Bouza García in the journal Media and Communication in 2025.
In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down “the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI)” office, saying it had engaged in censorship. The office and its predecessor, Rubio said, had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.”
But the EU is continuing with FIMI as one piece of its censorship strategy aimed, in part, at preventing certain candidates from running for office. The clearest case is Romania, where the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election in December 2024, after a populist had finished first. Eleven days later, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen cited “serious indications that foreign actors interfered in the Romanian presidential elections by using TikTok.” Others who examined the case found less. “At this stage, the sponsor behind the pro-GEORGESCU campaign remains unknown,” France’s own interference agency, VIGINUM, wrote two months later. And Euronews reported that one of Romania’s own governing parties had paid for a TikTok campaign.
Now, France is building its own FIMI machinery ahead of the 2027 presidential election. A July 2021 decree created VIGINUM under the prime minister’s defense secretariat, and the agency had 56 agents at the end of 2024. One of its four tests for an interference operation is the involvement of a foreign state or foreign entity.
Now, a new bill introduced by the Macron government drops even that test. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez filed bill no. 913 on July 22, 2026, and the Senate takes it up on Oct. 20. “The bill does not make the origin of the acts an essential criterion,” wrote the Conseil d’État, the government’s independent legal and policy adviser, in its July 16 opinion. The bill lets a prosecutor or any interested person ask a judge to stop the spread of manifestly inaccurate or “misleading” claims.
The foreign threat the bill invokes has been small by the government’s own count. Foreign operations detected during the March 2026 municipal elections “had only limited visibility, as well as an impact described as weak,” VIGINUM’s public report said in June.
And now, France’s foreign minister is pointing across the Atlantic. “It is from America that this frightening wave of uniformity comes,” said Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot on October 5, in a speech that named “MAGA circles.” Elon Musk endorsed Marine Le Pen in July. After that event, a deputy in the National Assembly from the left-wing party France Unbowed, which is behind the student protests and riots over the last two weeks, called it the start of foreign interference in the presidential election.
Germany is doing the same. “Illegal content, illegal hate and illegal fake news can be removed very quickly and without bureaucratic hurdle” (”Illegale Inhalte, illegaler Hass und illegale Fake News können sehr schnell und ohne bürokratische Hürde entfernt werden”), said Klaus Müller, the president of Germany’s federal network regulator, in 2024 (Public’s translation).
After Musk backed the Alternative for Germany (AfD) before the February 2025 election, a government spokeswoman said he was trying to influence the election. “Elon Musk is attempting the same thing as Vladimir Putin,” argued Lars Klingbeil, the Social Democratic leader, on Dec. 30, 2024. The Bundestag administration then opened a review of whether Musk’s conversation on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel was an illegal party donation.
In July 2026, the German chancellor warned the US government after its State Department offered grants of $1 million to $3 million for civil society work in Europe. “Conversely, I do not want the American government or institutions close to the government to interfere in German elections,” said Chancellor Friedrich Merz on July 15.
But the State Department’s grant notice stated that “implementers will not seek to influence the outcome of any election.”
The real foreign interference, in terms of social media manipulation, was done by the European Commission against Americans. The Commission “has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules,” found the Republican majority of the House Judiciary Committee in February 2026.
In 2024, then-Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová, a senior European bureaucrat, flew to California to meet TikTok’s CEO. Their agenda said the purpose was “election preparations.” TikTok’s staff asked if the meeting would stay EU-focused, or did the vice president want to discuss “both EU and US election preparations”? Said someone on the European side, “We are interested in both.”
Three months later, the EU’s top digital enforcer of the Digital Services Act sent an open letter to Elon Musk warning that X’s decision to host a live interview with Donald Trump might violate the law and that the commission would not hesitate to make full use of its toolbox against X.
Defund The Censors
The Disinfo2026 censorship conference is continuing without interruption and France is proudly backing it. “There’s absolutely no reason for us to change our commitments,” a diplomatic source at France’s foreign ministry told the Guardian.
But the censorship industrial complex is clearly on the defensive. Public sent its questions to the sponsors on Oct. 3, the State Department pressed their governments, and by Oct. 7 three of the four official supporters were off the web site. Estonia’s regulator told Public that its visible participation could “be interpreted as endorsing positions that fall outside TTJA’s mandate.” Brussels took the same view in private. “EU officials, the Guardian understands, did not agree with the characterisation of the US as a disinformation actor,” the Guardian reported. The Brussels outlet Rapporteur ran the story under a headline that blamed the EU. “EEAS runs scared of US ‘disinformation’ debate,” headlined Rapporteur over a story by Elisa Braun.
And European courts are finally pushing back against the censors. In February, the Cologne administrative court barred Germany’s domestic intelligence service, for now, from classifying the AfD as a confirmed extremist organization, and the government did not appeal. Six weeks earlier, a Bamberg court had acquitted a journalist who had received a seven-month suspended sentence over a meme of then-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.
And without American support for censorship, the European censors are weakened. VIGINUM noted “the massive withdrawal of American public funds” from the field in its latest annual report.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue had three staff on the Vilnius programme, and lists the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice among its funders.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department applied on Sept. 24 to join X’s challenge to the €120 million fine at the EU’s General Court.
In France, Marine Le Pen leads the polls for the presidential election in April. If she wins, she could take strong actions to shut down the censorship industrial complex in France. A poll taken Sept. 22 to 24 put her ahead of former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe by 57% to 43% in a runoff. A French president names the prime minister, and VIGINUM exists by decree under the prime minister’s defense secretariat. France’s foreign ministry could end its support for censorship conferences like #Disinfo2026.
If Le Pen does, she will be reversing the grave error of her party in supporting censorship in the past. National Rally deputies voted 46 to 0 for the 2024 foreign-interference law, and its members of the European Parliament, Jordan Bardella among them, voted for the DSA’s negotiating mandate in January 2022 and abstained on the final text.
But her words since then point the other way. “The Senate invents the French-style offense of opinion,” Le Pen’s statement of July 15 was headlined after a Senate report proposed a watchdog for domestic manipulation. Her statement went on to call the proposal “a tribunal of speech, without judge and without mandate.”
If Le Pen wins, she may find an ally in the Trump administration in defunding the censors. “We do not fund censorship activities,” the State Department spokesman told Public. “Countries make their own decisions about what to fund, but our position is clear. We are not concerned with genuine efforts to counter foreign propaganda that undermines our national security interests. But we are concerned about a blurring of boundaries: labeling legitimate political speech and opinions as ‘disinformation,’ targeting domestic viewpoints, or labeling the U.S. as a malign threat for defending free speech and sovereignty undermine the credibility of efforts and institutions who purport to counter adversarial influence.”
