On a grey October morning in Vilnius, the annual gathering of the people who spend their lives untangling lies, half-truths, and digital ghosts opened its doors with an odd, almost painful visual: strips of tape covering the logos of some of its most powerful government sponsors. The #Disinfo2026 conference, Europe’s flagship meeting for researchers and activists fighting disinformation, had expected to welcome the European Union’s diplomatic service, Canada, and Lithuania as proud backers. Instead, at the eleventh hour, those names were hurriedly hidden on banners and printed programs, leaving attendees with the uneasy sense that the very act of coming together to talk about foreign interference had become a delicate, dangerous political act. And in the days that followed, The Guardian added another layer to the story: the Trump administration had actively urged several countries to drop their sponsorship of the conference, making clear that even an event about information integrity was not safe from geopolitical pressure. For the researchers, nonprofit leaders, and tech officials gathered in the Lithuanian capital, the taped logos were more than a logistical snag — they were a symbol of a world in which the fight against disinformation itself was becoming a target.
To understand why this mattered so much, you need to know what the conference actually is. #Disinfo2026 was organized by EU DisinfoLab, a non-profit that serves as a kind of community center for the very scattered, often lonely field of countering foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI. It is a place where people from NGOs, think tanks, public authorities, and tech companies share research, compare notes, and build a shared vocabulary for describing the strange, shadowy ways that hostile actors try to warp public debate. Much of the time, that work happens quietly — through dense reports, webinars, and collaborative projects. But for a few days each year, the community meets in person, and the symbolic power of that get-together is immense. This year, however, the opening was marred by withdrawals that felt like a cold shower. The European External Action Service acknowledged it had asked for its logo to be removed, because some planned discussions were framed in ways that “do not align with the official positions held by the EU.” Canada’s Global Affairs offered a similar explanation, saying that after changes to panels, it had decided to revise its participation. Neither side said the word “politics” out loud, but everyone in the room understood it. “States, and state-affiliated agencies, shouldn’t have control over the program,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher and former Biden official who now leads The American Sunlight Project. “It’s part of the problem that governments have been acting so cowardly.”
The drama in Vilnius did not happen in a vacuum. For years, the European Union has been trying to build a stronger shield against foreign interference, viewing it as a growing threat to its democracies. The European Commission’s Democracy Shield initiative is the most visible of these efforts, designed to support civil society, independent fact-checking, and research into manipulative behavior online. EU DisinfoLab has been one of the organizations contributing experience to that project, and the conference was supposed to be a high point — a chance to show that Europe’s approach was robust, collaborative, and openly supported by governments. Instead, the event became a lesson in how fragile that public backing can be. France, notably, did not flinch. It remained the only major government sponsor with its logo untouched, and its foreign ministry issued a firm statement of support, pointing out that France is itself a major target of foreign information manipulation and that success in fighting it “relies to a large extent on the work and engagement of civil society.” The contrast between France’s steady posture and the last-minute retreat of other governments left researchers with a sobering insight: when a conference dares to ask uncomfortable questions, even allies can turn shy. The anger was not directed at Canada or Lithuania so much as at the larger reality that public funding for disinformation research had become a minefield, where a single panel topic could trigger a diplomatic panic.
What made the situation even more charged was the elephant in the room: the United States. For a long time, disinformation researchers in Europe had a kind of comfortable assumption that while hostile actors like Russia or China might try to manipulate opinions, Western governments were on the same side. That assumption has been crumbling, and at #Disinfo2026 it was confronted directly. The conference organizers scheduled a panel on whether the United States itself could now be considered a source of foreign information manipulation and interference in Europe — a question so delicate that the panel description called it “one of the most uncomfortable questions in the counter-disinformation field today.” The discomfort was not abstract. In the US, conservative activists and politicians have spent years accusing researchers who study misinformation and content moderation of being part of a censorship machine, often pointing to alleged coordination with platforms and government agencies. Those accusations once lived mainly in partisan media and congressional hearing rooms, but after Donald Trump returned to the White House, they hardened into policy. Programs related to information integrity were dismantled, budgets were cut, researchers faced new scrutiny, and the State Department used visa restrictions against foreign individuals accused of participating in censorship — a category that could easily include some of the people sitting in the Vilnius conference rooms. Every panel, every shared statistic, every coffee-break conversation took place against that backdrop, and the fear was tangible.
The most striking moment of the conference, for many attendees, was hearing Adam Fivenson, a fellow at American University’s Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology, speak on the uncomfortable panel about the US. Fivenson, who has faced the political chaos of the American research landscape firsthand, described the gathering in Vilnius as “an island of civil society sanity.” In the United States, he said, there are currently almost no opportunities to work domestically on helping people access high-quality information — the space has become so polluted and politicized that researchers are afraid to even use certain words. He saw the pressure on #Disinfo2026, including the presumed outreach by the Trump administration, as a sign of vulnerability rather than strength. “If they were confident in what they are doing, why would they care about this conference?” he asked. It was a brave way to frame things, turning anxiety into evidence that the work was having an impact. But Fivenson’s presence on that panel was itself a reminder that the fight has become intensely personal. Speakers were not just presenting data; they were putting their careers and, in some cases, their freedom to travel at risk. The visa restrictions against foreign researchers accused of censorship hung over the event like an unspoken warning: step out of line, and you too might find yourself barred from entering a country, or isolated from international funding.
And yet, despite all of that, the remarkable thing was that nobody pulled out. Every speaker who had been scheduled to appear showed up. The panels happened, questions were asked, arguments were made. Ben Schultz, lead researcher at The American Sunlight Project, noted that he had heard two panels discussing how the White House had sanctioned researchers in this field, and still the room was full. “To see people showing up is really nice,” he said. “These are scary times.” The resilience of the community was not accidental; it was born of a shared sense that if they stopped meeting, stopped talking, stopped collaborating, then the manipulators would win. The French government’s continued sponsorship was part of that defiance, a deliberate signal that European countries most exposed to foreign interference would not be intimidated. In September, before the conference even began, Politico had reported that Washington had quietly excluded French applicants from certain EU democracy funding until after the 2027 French elections, apparently to avoid any appearance of American interference — a strange, almost absurd form of pressure that showed how closely the United States was monitoring European civil society. For the researchers in Vilnius, that report, combined with the cloak-and-dagger withdrawal of sponsors, underscored a simple truth: the battle over disinformation was no longer just about correcting falsehoods. It was about who gets to decide what counts as manipulation, who gets to study it, and who gets to talk about it openly in public.
In the end, the six paragraphs of the #Disinfo2026 story are not just a tale of taped logos and diplomatic maneuvering. They are a human story about people who have devoted their lives to truth-telling suddenly finding themselves treated as threats. Some governments, including the EU’s own diplomatic service, chose to hide rather than defend the uncomfortable inquiry. Others, like France, stood firm. The organizers of EU DisinfoLab, for their part, remained silent, perhaps still processing the shock of having their sponsors pressured by a superpower. But the most meaningful response came from the researchers themselves. They flew in from different countries, sat amid banners with covered names, and did their work anyway. They debated whether the United States had become a source of foreign manipulation in Europe, knowing that the very question could be used against them. They listened to Fivenson’s hopeful interpretation of the pressure, and to Jankowicz’s anger at governments acting “cowardly.” And they left Vilnius with a clearer understanding of what they were up against: not just the trolls and bot networks and fabricated stories, but also the growing willingness of powerful governments to silence the people who study them. If the conference had a message, it was that disinformation research is no longer a purely technical discipline — it is an act of civic courage, performed by a community that refuses to be pushed into the shadows. The tape on the logos may have been a symbol of retreat, but the packed rooms and defiant conversations were a symbol of something stronger: the determination to keep asking uncomfortable questions, no matter who wants them covered up.