For three days in Vilnius, the annual gathering known as #Disinfo2026 should have felt like a familiar ritual for Europe’s small, tight-knit community of researchers, journalists, technologists, and policymakers who spend their working lives tracking lies and manipulation online. They had gathered in the Lithuanian capital, as they do every year, to compare notes on the latest influence operations, share technical tools for spotting coordinated inauthentic behavior, and warn one another about the next wave of hybrid threats. But this year something felt different, and it had little to do with Russia. Before the conference even began, the United States had quietly set to work behind the scenes, pressing the European Union, Canada, and Lithuania to distance themselves from the event entirely. The reason was not a security concern or a procedural dispute. It was the conference program itself: for the first time, panels were scheduled that described the United States as a “foreign information manipulation and interference” actor—a FIMI threat—alongside more familiar adversaries like Russia and China. The Trump administration, according to internal State Department cables seen by POLITICO and The Guardian, was not amused, and it wanted America’s allies to prove where they stood.
To understand the depth of the diplomatic rupture, it helps to understand the term at the center of the storm. FIMI is a distinctly European phrase, coined by the EU’s foreign policy machinery to describe activities that seek to distort public information and undermine democratic debate, often through the spread of disinformation online. For years, it has been used almost exclusively to describe the behavior of hostile foreign powers, above all Russia, whose troll farms, bot networks, and fake news sites have repeatedly targeted European elections and societies. The annual Vilnius conference, run by EU Disinfo Lab, an independent Brussels-based nonprofit, has long been a place where that European consensus is reinforced—where researchers present detailed reports on Kremlin operations, and where officials from EU institutions and allied governments network with civil society. This year, however, the organizers decided to broaden the lens. One panel was titled “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back,” and it was designed to ask a heretical question: what if the United States, under its current leadership, had itself become a source of foreign information manipulation in Europe? Another panel, “Under attack: How the counter-disinformation community is dealing with US government pressure,” brought in legal experts to discuss the chilling effect of American travel bans and political pressure aimed at European figures. The panels featured three American speakers, including a former CIA officer. It was, according to people familiar with the program, the first time the conference had seriously entertained the idea that Washington could be a disinformation actor in Europe.
The American reaction came fast and focused. State Department cables, obtained by the news organizations, showed that officials had taken particular notice of the “USA as a FIMI threat” panel and were determined to do something about it. The cables were sent to US embassies in several European countries—France, Norway, Romania, and Poland are named—as well as to the US mission to the European Union. The instructions were remarkably direct: embassy officials were to contact their host governments and verbally communicate Washington’s displeasure, and to “assess” whether those governments agreed with the characterization of the United States as a FIMI actor. The underlying message was that the conference had crossed a line by conflating the United States with “foreign adversaries like Russia and China.” In the language of the cables, this was a “false equivalence” that “obscures the scale and nature of Russian and Chinese interference in our democracies.” On the surface, that argument might sound reasonable: Russia’s disinformation campaigns are far more extensive, more aggressive, and more dangerous to European security than anything the United States has done. But for the researchers and officials who had helped build the conference, the American demand was something else—an attempt to police the boundaries of acceptable criticism, to force allies to publicly repudiate a discussion they had helped shape, and to punish an independent nonprofit for asking uncomfortable questions about democratic backsliding, propaganda, and the erosion of trust from within the transatlantic alliance. The fact that the United States, a country that prides itself on free speech and open debate, would use diplomatic muscle to suppress a panel at a disinformation conference struck many as deeply ironic.
The pressure worked, at least in part. Days before the conference opened, the logos of its main official supporters—the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European External Action Service, and Global Affairs Canada—were wiped from the conference website. When attendees arrived at the venue, they found white stickers affixed over the printed logos of these same organizations on official materials, a strange and awkward sight that seemed to embody the quiet withdrawal taking place behind closed doors. In separate statements, Lithuania, Canada, and the European Union each said that the conference program did not align with their official views on the role of the United States in disinformation. But here is the detail that makes the whole episode more puzzling and more troubling: that program had been public for months, since June, and none of these governments had raised objections before the State Department began making calls. It was only after American pressure that the conference, once a symbol of transatlantic solidarity in the fight against foreign interference, suddenly became a liability. The governments did not ask the organizers to remove the panels or change the program; they simply removed their own branding, a move that allowed them to claim they had not endorsed the event while still quietly allowing it to proceed. The European Union went even further, continuing to fund the conference even as it pulled its official logo from the website and materials. The result was a strange, almost farcical situation: a conference on disinformation taking place in the full glare of media attention, with its most powerful backers hiding in plain sight, their logos covered by white stickers, their statements carefully worded to avoid saying what everyone knew had happened.
Not every ally bent to Washington’s will. France, notably, refused to withdraw its support. A diplomatic source at the French foreign ministry told reporters that “there’s absolutely no reason for us to change our commitments” when it came to the conference. The French position was significant, not only because it broke with the pattern of compliance but because it suggested that the American pressure was not universally welcomed, and that some European governments still believed in the principle that disinformation researchers should be free to examine all threats, including those from friendly nations. The French stance was also a reminder that the issue was never really about whether the United States was as bad as Russia—few serious people think it is—but about whether the field of disinformation research could remain honest and independent if it was forced to draw a protective circle around one of its own subjects. For the researchers, journalists, and civil society groups at the conference, the experience was deeply unsettling. They had come to Vilnius to talk about how democracies could defend themselves against manipulation, only to find that one of the world’s most powerful democracies was using its influence to shape the conversation in ways that had nothing to do with truth or evidence. The white stickers on the conference materials became a kind of accidental art installation, a visual representation of the pressure that was being applied not to the content of the panels, but to the very idea that the United States could be studied, criticized, and held accountable in the same way as any other country.
In the end, the episode is less about one conference than about the state of the transatlantic relationship at a moment of profound strain. For years, European disinformation researchers have relied on a certain set of assumptions: that the United States and Europe share a common interest in defending democratic institutions; that Washington would support efforts to expose foreign interference, even when those efforts were critical of American behavior; and that the fight against disinformation was a joint project, not a partisan weapon. The State Department’s intervention in #Disinfo2026 shattered those assumptions, revealing a government that views criticism of the United States as a form of foreign interference in its own right, and that is willing to pressure its closest allies to suppress such criticism. It also left the European counter-disinformation community in a difficult position, caught between the need to maintain good relations with Washington and the need to preserve its own credibility. The organizers of the conference did not back down from their program, and the panels on American disinformation went ahead as scheduled. But the message from Washington was clear, and it will not be forgotten quickly: even allies, it seems, are not allowed to ask certain questions about the United States without facing consequences. The conference may have moved on to next year’s planning, but the scar tissue from this episode is likely to remain, a reminder that the tools once built to expose disinformation from abroad can themselves become targets, and that the struggle to protect democracy is not always a simple story of good versus evil.