Let’s be honest: most of us in the UK don’t think twice about what it means to live in a democracy. We grumble about politicians, roll our eyes at party scandals, and assume that elections, courts and the rule of law will always be there. It’s a comfortable assumption, reinforced by the fact that, as the Bayeux Tapestry reminds us, nobody has successfully invaded this island since 1066. Spend a few days in Lithuania, though, and that complacency starts to crack. I was in Vilnius last week as a guest of cybersecurity company Surfshark, attending #Disinfo2026, a conference dedicated to understanding how technology is being used to spread misinformation and disinformation around the world. The setting was fitting. Walking through the Museum of Occupation, which was once a KGB prison, I was reminded that Lithuania was invaded no less than three times during World War II. First came the Russians, in a secret pact with Germany to carve up the continent into spheres of influence. Then came the Germans, after Hitler broke the deal, occupying the country between 1941 and 1944. And then the Russians came back as Germany, overstretched and retreating, collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Most of Lithuania’s Jewish population was murdered. The vast majority of the country’s partisan resistance fighters were killed too. Many thousands more were executed by the KGB in the basement of the very museum I was standing in, or sent to Stalin’s remote gulags, where they perished from extreme cold and malnutrition. That history explains why Lithuania was the first Baltic state to declare independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, on 11 March 1990. And it explains why, with Vladimir Putin testing NATO’s resolve as Russia again tries to expand its once-great empire, Lithuania is on the front line, ringing the alarm bells. For many in the West, disinformation is an abstract threat. For Lithuania, it feels like a matter of survival.
#Disinfo2026 has been held since 2019, when it took place in Brussels, and is organised by the Brussels-based non-profit EU DisinfoLab. This year’s event in Vilnius was meant to bring together researchers, journalists and policymakers to discuss state-sponsored disinformation and the private companies that enable it. But before the Radisson Blu hotel even opened its doors, the conference had become a story in itself. Several sponsors were forced to pull out under pressure from the Trump administration, and the reason was a panel that asked whether the United States could be a FIMI threat—a threat of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. That might sound like a reasonable question for a disinformation conference, but it was enough to make the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European External Action Service and even Canada’s foreign ministry, Global Affairs Canada, withdraw their support. Nina Jankowicz, a former US official who briefly ran the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board, put it sharply: “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 criticising their government.” Perhaps the most absurd part was the physical aftermath. The organisers had to wipe the now-unwanted sponsor logos from the conference website, and someone had to spend days covering over names on programmes and billboards with blank white paper. It was a small, silly image, but also a chilling one: even a conference about manipulative narratives wasn’t safe from manipulation by a powerful government. And it set the tone for a week in which the line between official talking points and covert interference kept getting harder to trace.
If the US didn’t like being labelled a potential FIMI threat, it was unlikely to enjoy the keynote conversation between Diana Wallis, EU DisinfoLab’s board president, and Judge Kimberly Prost from the International Criminal Court. Prost has been sanctioned by the US after the ICC authorised an investigation into alleged atrocity crimes in Afghanistan, including a small component concerning US officials. She told delegates exactly what that means in practice. It’s not just that she can’t travel to the United States. All of your credit cards, wherever they were issued and by whoever issued them, are cancelled immediately. Banking services are withdrawn in their entirety. Access to everyday technology from American companies—smartphones, computers, cloud accounts from Apple and Google—can be cut off at random. Even a French company handling the court’s medical insurance contract refused to pay her claims, an example of how international institutions overcomply to avoid trouble. The message is clear: cooperate with us, or you will be made to suffer. But Prost insisted the real target isn’t her comfort or convenience. “The reason for this is that they are attacking the independence of the judiciary. They want us to stop doing our jobs or to decide cases the way they want,” she said. And she was defiant: “I can assure you that none of us—and I speak for all of my colleagues—will be intimidated.” It was a striking moment at a conference about disinformation. The US has never accepted the ICC’s authority, of course, and its sanctions are openly designed to punish judges for doing their jobs. If that isn’t interference, it’s hard to know what is. The rest of the conference focused mainly on authoritarian regimes, especially Russia, but Prost’s words hung over the room: the tools of coercion and narrative control are increasingly wielded by governments that claim to champion free speech.
One of the most detailed presentations came from Sarah Boutboul, a lead intelligence analyst at Blackbird.AI, in a session on Russia’s global information war. Her research showed how official Russian messaging infiltrates public discourse in Africa through a carefully orchestrated ecosystem of platforms. It starts on X and Telegram, where thousands of reposts and identical messages are generated to saturate the digital environment. These initial bursts are not really about creating conversation; they’re about overwhelming the information space. But to gain local credibility, the content is then moved to Facebook and other channels that African audiences actually use. There, it is repackaged with regional context, French-language captions, sovereignty symbols and local flags. The foreign origin is deliberately obscured. “The objective really is to reduce the visibility of Russian origin and make the content appear embedded into a domestic and regional media conversation,” Boutboul explained. This “hidden tier” includes entities like the African Initiative, which act as a bridge between official state narratives and regional commentators, creating the illusion of grassroots support. The aim is to discredit Western security partnerships while presenting Russia as a sovereign alternative. It’s a sophisticated form of psychological warfare, and it’s happening across a continent where many countries still struggle with fragile media ecosystems and weak digital literacy. What makes it particularly dangerous is the way it feeds on genuine anti-colonial sentiment, twisting legitimate grievances into pro-Kremlin narratives. The researchers were clear: Russian operatives are not just spreading lies; they are building parallel information ecosystems that make it almost impossible for ordinary users to tell where a local opinion ends and a foreign propaganda campaign begins.
Europe is also in the crosshairs. In a session called Elections Under Attack, journalists Omer Benjakob of Haaretz and Amaëlle Guiton of Libération painted a bleak picture. “In every country now, when an election is taking place, the question is not whether someone will try to disrupt it, but when it will happen,” Guiton said. At the heart of modern operations are digital avatars—entirely fictitious online personas crafted to mimic real human behaviour. These are not simple bots; they use Disinformation-as-a-Service platforms, much like Ransomware-as-a-Service in cybercrime. Private contractors and shadowy tech companies sell the ability to generate thousands of convincing fake people, complete with tailored profile histories, localised images and social graphs designed to infiltrate online communities, evade detection and manufacture artificial consensus. This blurs the line between foreign and domestic interference. As Benjakob put it, “One man’s FIMI [Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference] is another man’s DIMI [Domestic Information Manipulation and Interference].” Yet despite the high-tech veneer, these operations are often surprisingly sloppy. In recent municipal elections in France, a covert campaign targeted left-wing parties and individual candidates with fabricated scandals, defamatory blogs and targeted social media ads. Investigators found telltale signs of rushed deployment throughout the digital trail, including text strings accidentally left behind by generative AI tools, such as “If you want, I can also write you a short version or a punchy version for social media.” The fake avatars and proxy profiles also retained metadata and digital footprints from previous, entirely unrelated marketing campaigns and overseas assignments. One company linked to this activity is the Israeli firm BlackCore, which France’s Viginum says used proxy accounts to target John Swinney, the Scottish National Party and the Scottish government during Scottish elections. It also focused on municipal elections in France, the New York mayoral election won by Zohran Mamdani, and countries like Togo and Angola. BlackCore is not alone: investigators have mapped a whole ecosystem of disinformation-for-hire firms, including Team Jorge, known for its AIMS avatar platform; Psy-Group, which rebranded as Percepto and was exposed for operations in Burkina Faso; Stoic, hired via Israel’s Diaspora Ministry to target US lawmakers; and Black Cube, linked to smear campaigns during Slovenian elections. The industry is booming, and it is increasingly professionalised.
So what can ordinary people do? The answer is both simple and depressing: it’s getting harder. In a session called Digital Deception: from bots to scams, Justas Pukys, Senior Product Manager at Surfshark, presented research conducted with master design students from Malmö University. They created an interactive installation called “Bot or Not” that asked participants to build their own custom bots and then try to distinguish AI-generated social media communication from real humans. More than 1,700 people from different age groups took part, and over half failed to correctly separate bot profiles from real people. Emotional tone mattered: bots with a negative tone were detected about 50% of the time, while friendly or positive bots fooled people much more effectively, with detection dropping to 38%. Neutral bots hovered around 40%. There were demographic gaps too: participants under 20 were significantly better at spotting bots than those over 50, and users of text-based platforms like X performed better than users of visual platforms like TikTok. This matters beyond a parlor game. Modern AI has stripped away the traditional warning signs of scams—the grammatical errors, the weird phrasing, the obvious fake addresses. “In the past, when you got an SMS message you could identify that there were some mistakes, some wrong addresses… but these days everything is crafted so well that it’s very complicated to tell whether it’s real or not,” Pukys said. His advice is practical, if unglamorous: slow down, verify information, and use security tools. If a message demands urgency, especially if money is involved, pause before reacting. Use AI tools to cross-reference claims. Install detection software that scans emails, text messages and phone calls for deepfakes. And if something malicious gets through, isolate the device immediately to stop it spreading. The emotional trigger is the hook. As Pukys concluded, “Emotion is often a common trigger. Key defensive strategies are to slow down before reacting and utilise defensive tools wherever possible.” In an age where fake people, fake stories and fake urgency are everywhere, the most human thing we can do is take a breath and think before we click. That may not sound like much, but in a world saturated with synthetic influence, it might be the most radical act of resistance left.