The annual conference on foreign information manipulation opened in Vilnius this week under a heavy, unspoken cloud. The venue was ready, the panels were set, and the coffee was hot. But the atmosphere among the researchers, journalists, and civil society activists gathering in the Lithuanian capital was more reminiscent of a family reunion trying to avoid a difficult uncle than of a confident community of fact-checkers and democracy defenders. On the agenda was a question that many considered the natural next step for a field that had spent years documenting Russian interference, troll farms, and election meddling: Can the United States be considered a threat to Europe’s information space? To ask it was to acknowledge that the architecture of the transatlantic relationship, so long assumed to be the bedrock of the free world’s defenses, had developed cracks. And to ask it in a public forum, with government sponsors attached, was apparently too dangerous for some. What began as a professional discussion about manipulation and resilience quickly turned into a diplomatic incident, and the very people who study the weaponization of information found themselves caught in a political minefield.
The conference was EU DisinfoLab’s annual #Disinfo2026 gathering, held on 7 and 8 October in Vilnius. For years, this event has served as a kind of annual check-up for the European ecosystem that fights disinformation. It brings together an unusual coalition: researchers who study the mechanics of fake news, journalists who debunk viral falsehoods, civil society groups that monitor social media platforms, technology specialists who track bot networks, and policymakers who try to turn this research into regulation and defense. The jargon-heavy acronym FIMI—foreign information manipulation and interference—is the umbrella term the European Union uses, and it has become a universal language in these corridors. The program for this year was deliberately forward-looking, less interested in the familiar task of analyzing fake news and more concerned with practical responses. Organizers wanted to move beyond documenting what was happening and toward questions of disruption, deterrence, and litigation. They planned to discuss how states and societies could push back against foreign interference, how to attribute attacks with confidence, and how to hold malicious actors legally accountable. It was supposed to be an optimistic, action-oriented agenda. But then, shortly before the conference began, several of its government supporters quietly walked away. Their logos disappeared from the website and the conference materials. There was no dramatic statement, no public explanation, just an awkward, telling absence. The Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Global Affairs Canada, and the European External Action Service—the EU’s own diplomatic arm—all dropped off the list of sponsors.
The reason for their withdrawal was both obvious and deeply uncomfortable. The dispute centered on a single panel, soberly titled “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back.” According to the published program, the session was not intended to be a screaming match or an anti-American rally. It was meant to ask a practical, strategic question: if the United States can no longer be counted on as a reliable partner in defending democratic norms online, how should Europe’s counter-disinformation community build resilience without Washington? What should solidarity look like in a transatlantic relationship that has become fractured, unpredictable, and politically volatile? These are not abstract questions. European researchers have noted with growing unease that American political discourse, amplified by social media, sometimes echoes the same manipulative techniques used by foreign adversaries. They have seen American officials attack European institutions, European elections, and European journalists with alarming frequency. They have watched the United States become a source of political destabilization in ways that once would have seemed impossible. The panel was intended to create a space where these observations could be examined honestly, without hysteria and without moral panic. But the subject itself was enough to trigger a diplomatic crisis before a single speaker took the stage.
What happened next revealed a great deal about the discreet mechanics of international pressure. Reuters reported that the U.S. State Department had actively lobbied Canada and European allies to distance themselves from the conference. American officials, according to three sources familiar with the matter and correspondence reviewed by reporters, contacted their counterparts in Lithuania, Canada, and France. They made their displeasure known in private calls and diplomatic notes, and they pushed the foreign ministries to reconsider their sponsorship. The pressure worked. The Canadian and Lithuanian foreign ministries, both of which had been listed as official supporters, pulled back. The European External Action Service also withdrew, although it was unclear whether its decision resulted from the same pressure or from a sober calculation that it could not appear to tolerate a conversation about a major ally in such terms. The result was a near-complete dismantling of the conference’s official government backing. The conference itself went ahead, and many of the participants spoke openly about their disappointment. But the shadow of this silencing was everywhere. Here was a meeting devoted to foreign information manipulation and interference, and its organizers had discovered that threats to open society could come not only from adversary states, but also from the uncomfortable expectations of allied governments.
The irony was impossible to escape. The United States has traditionally positioned itself as the champion of free expression, the defender of democratic institutions, and the leading voice against authoritarian disinformation. American agencies have poured resources into supporting independent media and civil society around the world, and the U.S. government has often used its influence to bolster vulnerable democracies against Russian and Chinese manipulation. To see American diplomats using their leverage to suppress a panel discussion—and to see traditionally supportive allies like Canada and Lithuania bend to that pressure—was a striking inversion of stated American values. It suggested that the U.S. State Department, at least at the level of its diplomatic operations, regarded a frank conversation about American influence in European information space as an unacceptable threat to alliance cohesion. Yet in trying to prevent that conversation, the diplomats did more than protect the alliance; they inadvertently demonstrated why the conversation needed to happen in the first place. Information manipulation and interference do not always involve fabricated calls from troll farms or secret cyber operations. Sometimes they involve quiet phone calls, gentle reminders, official backing withdrawn, and agendas shaped through social pressure rather than legalistic fiat. The conference in Vilnius was thus transformed into a live case study of the very phenomena it had gathered to study. The question was no longer merely whether the United States could be considered a threat to Europe’s information space. It was whether the transatlantic community could still tolerate the kind of uncomfortable, necessary debate that gives democratic institutions their resilience.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the Vilnius incident is that the information landscape has changed so profoundly that old categories no longer fit comfortably. During the Cold War, the division was clear: open societies versus closed ones, democratic information systems versus authoritarian propaganda machines. The relationship between Western allies was not perfect, but it rested on a basic assumption of shared values. Today, that assumption is no longer reliable. European researchers and politicians increasingly find themselves navigating a murky environment in which information threats come from multiple directions at once, and in which the line between foreign adversary and foreign ally is blurred by domestic politics inside both the European Union and the United States. The decision to withdraw official support from a panel on American information threats was not actually about the panel’s content. It was about the fear that asking such questions in public would weaken the coalition at a moment when unity against traditional adversaries was already fragile. But that fear is itself a symptom of the problem. A democratic alliance cannot defend itself against manipulation if it cannot examine its own vulnerabilities, and a partner state’s behavior in the information domain is a legitimate subject of scrutiny. The human dimension is equally important. The researchers and journalists who gathered in Vilnius were not radicals; they were professionals with years of experience, many of them focused primarily on Russian disinformation. To see their work dismissed or their conference stripped of official sponsorship based on a single session must have felt profoundly demoralizing. It sends a message that the truth about the information environment cannot be spoken aloud when it annoys powerful friends. That is a dangerous message, not only for civil society but for democracy itself.
In the end, the conference in Vilnius went on, and the panel—as far as the program indicated—remained on the schedule, even without official sponsorship. The organizers did not cancel the discussion; they simply had to hold it in an atmosphere of reduced institutional cover. The diplomats who pressured them may have achieved their immediate goal of distancing their governments from the controversy, but they also succeeded in drawing more attention to the question than the panel would ever have generated on its own. Journalists wrote stories, official statements were requested, and an entire international audience learned that the United States, the European Union, and Canada could not agree on whether it was acceptable to even discuss the notion of American information influence. If the original intention was to protect transatlantic harmony, the outcome was the opposite. The incident became an argument for the panel’s existence. The best response to foreign information manipulation and interference is not the suppression of difficult questions, but the creation of spaces where those questions can be examined with rigor, honesty, and a willingness to adapt. That is the deeper purpose of the counter-disinformation community in Europe, and it is precisely what was at risk in Vilnius. The conference was not an attack on America; it was an attempt to build resilience in a changing world. If the allies cannot sit together in a room and discuss that change without diplomatic fury, then the information space they are trying to protect is already weaker than they think. The question about the United States is not an easy one, and the answer may be uncomfortable. But silencing the question will not make the underlying problem go away. It will only ensure that, when the answer comes, it will arrive too late to matter.