Imagine arriving at a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, ready to spend days with researchers and activists who track the dark arts of disinformation. You walk past the registration desk, glance at the sponsor board, and notice something odd: several names have been hastily covered with tape or paper. The logos for Canada’s diplomatic service, the European Union’s foreign affairs arm, and Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry are still recognizable enough to identify, but officially they are absent. That was the strange scene that greeted attendees at the annual gathering organized by EU DisinfoLab, a Brussels-based nonprofit dedicated to exposing foreign information manipulation. By Wednesday, the reason became clear. The government of Canada had pulled its sponsorship, and a Canadian official had withdrawn from chairing a panel, because the conference included discussions that treated the United States as a possible source of foreign interference. The move was a quiet but significant diplomatic statement, wrapped in the careful language of “framing” and “participation,” and it sent a ripple through the community of people who spend their professional lives trying to defend democratic institutions from manipulation. There is something almost painfully ironic about a conference about disinformation having to cover up the names of its own government supporters because of a disagreement over what counts as the truth.
The conference is not a fringe gathering. It draws researchers, civil society organizations, and government officials who work on a problem known by the acronym FIMI: foreign information manipulation and interference. That term describes efforts by foreign governments or their proxies to distort the information environment, to confuse, divide, or mislead publics, and to erode trust in institutions. It is the kind of threat that Canada and its allies have spent years warning about, particularly in the context of Russia and China. So when the program included panels exploring the United States as a FIMI actor, it created a delicate problem for governments that had agreed to lend their names as supporters. Global Affairs Canada, Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry, and the European External Action Service were all initially listed as supporters of the annual conference, which is largely attended by researchers and civil society organizations. As the gathering got underway in Vilnius, their names were covered up on signs, according to photos shared with CBC News. The French government, for now, remains a sponsor. The image of taped-over logos is almost too perfect a metaphor for the discomfort: institutions that publicly champion the fight against disinformation suddenly did not want to be associated with a conversation that pointed a finger at a close ally. It is one thing to talk about foreign interference in the abstract, and quite another to sit on a stage and discuss the possibility that your own partner, your own protector, your own neighbor, might be doing some of the interfering.
The most pointed example of this discomfort was a panel about the Arctic. A Global Affairs Canada official had been scheduled to chair a session on disinformation in the region, but pulled out, according to Ben Shultz of the American Sunlight Project, a presenter at the conference. The panel was designed to discuss Greenland and what Shultz described as “growing evidence that the United States has, in specific Arctic contexts, operated as a FIMI actor.” Shultz shared the initial plan for the panel from months ago, which included talking about the United States as a foreign interference actor. Given the current U.S. administration’s repeated interest in Greenland, and the broader geopolitical importance of the Arctic, the panel was always going to be sensitive. But Shultz said the withdrawal of three governments was a “shock” and questioned whether they had been pressured. “Thankfully every speaker has still shown up, which is awesome, and I think a testament to the resolve of the research community. But it’s definitely put a bit of a damper on the atmosphere,” he said in an interview. His words capture the strange mood of the event: the researchers were still there, ready to present their findings, but the official endorsement had evaporated. It is a difficult position to be in, to have your work validated by governments only until it becomes inconvenient. The researchers were not changing their findings; they were simply losing their sponsors. And that, in itself, is a kind of lesson about how power operates in the information age.
The official statements from the withdrawing governments were carefully worded and conspicuously vague. Samantha Lafleur, a spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, said the government took issue with the framing of some panels. “Following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, GAC decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference,” she wrote. She did not answer questions about which changes had bothered the government, or whether the United States had raised concerns. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine suggests that the description of Wednesday’s panel on pushing back against the U.S. as a foreign interference threat had not changed since Sept. 9, which raises questions about what “changes” the Canadian government was referring to. The European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic service, said in a statement that it asked to have its logo removed from the material associated with the conference “in view of the content of the programme.” Asked whether that was related to the U.S. foreign interference panel, an EU spokesperson repeated that the logo was removed because “organizers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the official positions held by the EU.” Neither Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry nor the conference organizers responded to a request for comment. The language is the kind of diplomatic fog that usually means: we cannot say what we really think, but we want you to know we disapprove. It is a way of distancing yourself without explaining yourself, of punishing without acknowledging the punishment, and of sending a message to other researchers and organizers about what topics are safe to explore.
The timing and context make the Canadian decision especially hard to read as a purely principled stand. The withdrawal came in the same week that the Globe and Mail reported that some people involved in campaigning for Alberta independence had met with U.S. entities on both sides of the border. CBC News had previously reported that some of those meetings took place in U.S. State Department offices in Washington, D.C., last year. Canada is also in the middle of a bitter and often personal trade dispute with the Trump administration, with tariffs, threats, and sharp words flying between Ottawa and Washington. In that atmosphere, a Canadian government official chairing a panel that describes the United States as a foreign information manipulator would be more than an academic exercise. It would be a diplomatic grenade. So the decision to withdraw may have been less about the merits of the research and more about the practical realities of managing a relationship with a powerful, unpredictable neighbor. Lafleur tried to soften the move by saying Canada “remains firmly committed to addressing the challenge of disinformation and misinformation” and that Global Affairs Canada officials “look forward to engaging with partners and stakeholders on efforts to counter disinformation.” But the message to the conference was clear: there are limits to how far official Canada will go in naming friends as threats. It is a familiar dilemma for governments, which must balance their stated values against their strategic interests. But for the researchers in Vilnius, it was a reminder that the fight against disinformation is not just a battle against foreign adversaries; it is also a battle over who gets to define what is dangerous and what is acceptable.
What does this episode say about the state of the fight against disinformation? It suggests that the fight is no longer a simple story of democracies versus authoritarian adversaries. It has become entangled with politics, alliances, and the awkward realities of who gets to define the truth. For researchers who study FIMI, the ideal is to follow evidence wherever it leads, even if it points to Washington or Ottawa or Brussels. But governments are not research institutions; they are political actors with relationships to protect. When a conference organizer includes a panel on U.S. interference in the Arctic, they are testing the limits of that ideal. The fact that Canada, the EU, and Lithuania all pulled their support suggests that the limits are real. The irony is hard to miss: the very governments that fund and promote disinformation research are not always comfortable with what that research finds. The researchers still showed up, as Shultz noted, and that is a small victory for intellectual independence. But the covered logos and withdrawn chairs are a reminder that the truth can be a dangerous thing to tell, especially when it makes your friends uncomfortable. The conference may go on, but the message has been delivered: some threats are easier to name than others, and the fight against disinformation is not as clean or as united as it once seemed. In the end, the most human response to all of this might be a shrug of resignation, because everyone in that room understood what was happening. They had seen it before, in other contexts, with other governments. The only difference was that this time the uncomfortable truth was about the United States, and the sponsors could not bring themselves to stand next to it.