Imagine arriving at a conference about lies and manipulation, only to discover that some of your own backers have quietly slipped away, their names hidden under white stickers. That was the strange atmosphere in Vilnius this week, where #Disinfo2026—the annual gathering of Europe’s counter-disinformation community—brought together hundreds of researchers, journalists, technologists and policymakers in a hotel for two days of talks, workshops and debate. The conference is run by EU Disinfo Lab, an independent Brussels nonprofit, and for years it has been one of the most important meeting points for people working to understand how foreign governments use information as a weapon. But in the days before it opened, the logos of three main supporters—the Lithuanian ministry of foreign affairs, the European External Action Service and Global Affairs Canada—were removed from the event’s website. Photographs obtained by The Guardian show white stickers slapped over the same logos on printed conference materials, enough to look like a hasty repair job rather than a planned change. According to three people familiar with the matter, including European officials, the US State Department had been in contact with multiple governments over their support for the gathering. By the time the conference opened on Wednesday, Canada, Lithuania and the EU’s diplomatic service had all agreed to step back as official sponsors. The event went ahead, but a shadow hung over it: a community built to expose information manipulation had found itself, rather publicly, caught in what looked like a manipulation of its own institutional support.
The pressure was not just a general expression of displeasure; it was targeted at a particular idea. Internal State Department documents seen by The Guardian show US officials thanking Lithuania for “taking US concerns seriously” and welcoming the government’s decision to limit involvement. Washington, the documents state, was “grateful” that Lithuania found a conference panel framing the United States as a foreign information threat “reprehensible and surprising.” That panel, titled “USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back,” took place on Wednesday, and FIMI stands for “foreign information manipulation and interference”—the official European vocabulary for the kind of activity the conference was created to study. It was the first time the event appears to have seriously entertained the idea that the United States might itself be a disinformation actor in Europe. The panel included three American speakers, one of them a former CIA officer, and its guiding question was how Europe’s counter-disinformation community could rebuild resilience without Washington as a partner. That question alone, apparently, was enough to provoke diplomatic intervention. One person familiar with the deliberations said the State Department was explicitly focused on this panel, and that some communications appeared to originate from the office of Sarah B Rogers, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. The Guardian also understands from French officials that France was contacted as well; France, in the end, did not bow to the pressure. For many at the conference, the reversal was stunning. The US government had historically been a funder and ally in this work, a supporter of efforts to expose Russian and Chinese influence operations. Now it was pressing allied governments to disavow a conversation that merely asked whether Washington’s fingerprints might also be found in the information landscape.
The official statements that followed did not make the situation clearer; they made it stranger. Lithuania’s foreign ministry said it had “cancelled its participation” in #Disinfo2026 because several parts of the program differed from the official position of the Government. Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Samantha Lafleur said the department “carefully assesses participation in, and sponsorship of, external events on a case-by-case basis,” adding that following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, it decided to revise its participation in those sessions—though Canadian officials continued to take part. An EU spokesperson confirmed that the European External Action Service had withdrawn support because the organizers had chosen to frame some discussions in ways that did not align with the official positions held by the EU. EU officials, The Guardian understands, did not agree with the characterization of the US as a disinformation actor. But if the program truly clashed with these governments’ positions, why had those positions been silent for months? The program had been in place since June, long before any of these governments raised concerns. And the EU, despite removing its logo, never stopped funding the conference. In its latest report on foreign information manipulation and interference threats, published in March, the EU’s diplomatic service categorized Russia and China as threat actors and made no negative reference to the United States. The result is a series of explanations that feel carefully worded rather than sincerely felt. The haste of the retreat was visible in the white stickers on the printed programs, which looked less like a deliberate administrative decision than a last-minute response to pressure. It is one thing for a government to disagree with an event and withdraw support. It is another to change course so abruptly, with no public acknowledgment of what actually changed—and to keep funding the event, quietly, while pretending the sponsorship no longer counts.
The wider implications are hard to ignore, and uncomfortable to name. Nina Jankowicz, a former US official and disinformation expert who in 2022 briefly led the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board—a short-lived body that Republicans condemned as a vehicle for policing Americans’ speech—said she understood that Washington had pressured Lithuania and Canada to withdraw. “What this amounts to is a purported defender of free speech at the state department using the enormous power of the US government to try to pressure Americans from criticizing their government,” she said. That is a damning formulation, and it captures the irony many participants already felt. This is not a conference of anti-American radicals; it is a professional community of people who study authoritarian influence and often work at great personal and professional risk. For the United States to intervene in the program of such a meeting is precisely the kind of behavior these researchers are used to analyzing in hostile governments. The pressure also fits a broader pattern. Over the past year, the State Department has taken an increasingly interventionist posture toward free speech and civil society in Europe. The Guardian has revealed that it is awarding millions of dollars in non-competitive grants to organizations across the continent that are supportive of Trump’s agenda. Those grants may not come with overt conditions, but they change the calculus of any organization that hopes to work with American institutions. The Vilnius episode shows what a dependency can look like in practice: a few phone calls, a few signals, and governments begin to reposition themselves, not because they are convinced but because they are cautious. That caution is understandable. It still does not make it healthy.
France, notably, took a different path. A diplomatic source at the French foreign ministry said there was “absolutely no reason for us to change our commitments” when it came to supporting the conference. “We stick to supporting civil society. It’s not just principled, it’s operational,” the source said, adding that the conference was a “laboratory” that helped Europe develop key policy around disinformation. The phrase is worth pausing on. In many countries, official sponsorship of a conference is not a blank check for its content; it is an investment in a space where ideas can be tested, challenged and refined. #Disinfo2026 is exactly that kind of space. It is where researchers share evidence, journalists compare notes, technologists explain new tools and policymakers listen—sometimes awkwardly, sometimes productively—to what the evidence actually shows. When a government pulls its logo from such an event because it does not like one panel, it sends a message far beyond that panel. It tells everyone in the field that some questions are best not asked; that official support can vanish if the wrong issue receives too much attention; that the line between acceptable and unacceptable research may be drawn in Washington rather than in Europe. France’s refusal to play that game is therefore not just an act of solidarity. It is an argument about how resilient democratic institutions are actually built. They are built by protecting uncomfortable conversations, not by curating them for diplomatic comfort. The fact that this argument now has to be made explicitly—and by a European ally, about the United States—is itself a measure of how much the transatlantic information environment has changed.
Nowhere is the tension more visible than in Lithuania. The country, a member of both the EU and Nato, borders Russia and its close ally Belarus, and for years it has lived with the consequences of being on the front line of Europe’s security order. The United States has kept a rotating armored battalion of nearly 1,000 troops in Lithuania since 2019, and the American military presence is widely seen as a vital guarantee against Russian aggression. That dependence sat awkwardly next to the news about the conference. Just before the event, Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius said Lithuania would be willing to pay for a permanent US military base if Washington agreed. He said he first proposed the idea in a meeting with Trump’s envoy, John Coale, and called it a “critically important guarantee of deterrence and security.” The day after Sinkevicius spoke, Trump said he would consider the request. “They are great people, so we will certainly look at it,” the president said on Monday. It does not take a conspiracy theorist to connect those two stories: a small Baltic nation seeking a permanent American security umbrella is not in a strong position to argue with the State Department over a conference panel about American disinformation. Lithuania’s decision to withdraw its sponsorship may have been entirely logical from the perspective of national security. But it also illustrates the quiet cost of that logic. When security dependence becomes the frame through which all other questions are considered, some truths become inconvenient. The researchers and journalists gathered in Vilnius this week understood that better than most. At the entrance to the conference, they saw white stickers covering familiar logos. The stickers were small, but the message was not: even in an open society, relying on a superpower for protection can make it harder to speak openly about that superpower. For a community dedicated to truth and transparency, that is a sobering lesson—and perhaps the most important one this year’s conference had to offer.