Washington has reportedly pressured several governments to withdraw their support for a conference organized by an EU-funded “anti-disinfo” NGO that designated the US a potential source of foreign disinformation.

The event host is EU DisinfoLab, one of Brussels’ info-gatekeepers deployed to scapegoat and smear dissidents opposing the bloc’s political course. The NGO notoriously launched its career by labeling online critics of French President Emmanuel Macron as “Russophiles.”

Organizers of the #Disinfo2026 conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, reportedly classified the US as a “foreign information manipulation and interference” (FIMI) actor, according to two news outlets with insider sources in Brussels. The EU normally uses the term to describe alleged malicious online activities by geopolitical rivals such as Russia and China.

By the time the conference opened, the logos of the EU’s diplomatic service, the European External Action Service (EEAS), and the foreign ministries of Canada and Lithuania had disappeared from all material, leaving only the French Foreign Ministry and the Vilnius city administration.

Rapporteur, formerly known as Euractiv, attributed the changes to a pressure campaign initiated by American writer Michael Shellenberger, who withdrew as a speaker after learning that the US had been designated a FIMI actor.

Politico cited the US State Department and cables instructing American embassies to convey Washington’s objections.

“Labeling the United States a ‘FIMI threat’ – a term normally reserved for describing influence operations of adversaries – undermines shared goals and should alarm those involved,” officials told the outlet.

The Russiagate hoax, involving a concerted campaign by former US President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to falsely claim US President Donald Trump was somehow compromised by links to Russia, helped fuel the emergence of an industry of self-described experts in combating online disinformation and misinformation. Critics have accused such organizations of serving as proxies for government-backed censorship that authorities cannot impose directly.

Belgium-based EU DisinfoLab first attracted widespread attention in 2018, when it alleged Russian efforts to amplify a political scandal involving Macron’s security aide, Alexandre Benalla, who had been filmed assaulting protesters while wearing police equipment.

The NGO’s research identified alleged “Russian bots” and “French Russophile” Twitter accounts supposedly fueling public outrage over the affair. Critics questioned its methodology, prompting the organization to publish detailed information about the accounts it had studied, including those of opposition politicians Jean-Luc Melenchon and Marine Le Pen.

In 2022, the Belgian Data Protection Authority (APD) fined EU DisinfoLab €2,700 ($3,000) and its lead researcher, Nicolas Vanderbiest, €1,200 ($1,300), while formally reprimanding both. The regulator, which investigated the case in cooperation with France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, found that the researchers had unlawfully processed personal data revealing political opinions and exposed users to potential discrimination through political profiling.

The decision prompted French National Rally MEP Virginie Joron to question whether EU DisinfoLab should continue receiving funding from Brussels. Grants allocated by the European Commission to the NGO over the years have added up to at least €1.4 million ($1.6 million), according to financial disclosures.

EU DisinfoLab’s leadership reflects the close ties between the Western “counter-disinformation” industry and government-backed infowarfare operations.

Board member Emma Le Mesurier is the widow and former colleague of James Le Mesurier, a former British Army officer who helped establish the White Helmets in Syria. The Western-funded group aided jihadist forces in overthrowing President Bashar Assad.

Fellow board member Andy Pryce is a veteran British diplomat who launched and led the Foreign Office’s program intended to thwart Russian strategic communications. His name also appeared in the “UK Cluster” of the Integrity Initiative, a British-funded media manipulation project exposed by the leak of its internal documents in 2018.

Former board member and researcher Camille Francois worked on an investigation into the 2016 “Russian interference” in the US on behalf of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The EU DisinfoLab annual conference program includes a yoga session and discussions of “identity-based disinformation” and “Russia’s global information war.”Cases of debunked Western disinformation, plentiful as they are, received little attention.

One example was the alleged Russian attempt to jam the navigation system of a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over Bulgaria last year. The story unravelled when Bulgarian authorities said their monitoring systems had detected no GPS interference, contrary to statements by EU officials.

A similar case last month involved a claim that a Russian drone had nearly struck a plane carrying Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, which Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store stated during a joint press conference. However, Moldovan authorities later clarified that Zelensky’s flight from Chisinau to Oslo had merely been briefly delayed by a drone alert. The drone in question crashed some 160 km from the airport.

https://rt-english.com/news/646919-us-disinformation-conference-eu/?ysclid=mv766myoxz889788649

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EU anti-‘disinfo’ effort falls apart after trying to be honest about the US

When one panel dared name Washington, Brussels and its allies fled – because it has always been about power, not truth

BY Rachel Marsden

It was supposed to be a safe space for all the Karens and institutionally-backed wine moms who spend their days policing public discourse like it’s neighborhood Block Watch fodder. Instead, this year’s EU #Disinfo2026 confab in Lithuania turned into a bust.

What happened was basically the equivalent of a friend’s husband getting called out ahead of the confab as the neighborhood perv, prompting everyone to ghost the meetup at the last minute.

The problem? A scheduled panel called ‘USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back.’ Incidentally, ‘FIMI threat’ is one of those hip acronyms that these people are overpaid to come up with so that it sounds like they’re doing something only those with their rare expertise can wrangle. In reality, it just means ‘foreign information manipulation and interference,’ and the average seventh grader can push back against it on social media if they want to. Usually with memes that are a lot more savvy, and without billing taxpayers.

The meetup was organized by the Brussels-backed EU Disinfo Lab, and was apparently such a great use of EU funds that the bloc had its own sponsorship logo taken right off the promotional signage and bailed on itself. “The organizers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the positions held by the EU,” said EU foreign affairs spokesman Christian Wigand.

And Lithuania couldn’t even be bothered to roll down the street in their pajamas to attend this thing. “Lithuania has cancelled its participation in Disinfo 2026 as several parts of the conference program differ from the official position of the government,” its Foreign Ministry said.

Color me shocked that people who put an extraordinary amount of effort into corralling the masses into establishment-approved groupthink have just had a collective anaphylactic reaction to a deviation from it.

What about Canada? Surely it maintained its presence, right? Particularly since there’s a lot of talk in Canada these days about entities close to Trump, including State Department officials, getting involved in manipulation efforts to gin up incredibly long-shot independence movements in the provinces of Alberta and Quebec, with a view to gaining control of Canadian resources and then pressuring the federal government into doing what Trump wants. So you’d think that Canada would have relished the opportunity to head over to this conference and confront Washington, knowing that its behavior would be a focus. At the very least, it would have been a chance to demonstrate that all this talk about defending democracy and information integrity extends beyond smack talking from a comfortable distance.

“Following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, Global Affairs Canada decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference,” a Canadian government spokeswoman said.

What could possibly have been behind all these US allies bailing in such a coordinated fashion? Couldn’t have been because they were all being pressured, right? Surely, nobody would ever think of manipulating anyone into not attending a conference about manipulation.

While we are unable to comment on the details of diplomatic conversations, it should not be a surprise that countries would disaffiliate from this conference upon learning that it labeled the US a ‘FIMI threat,’” the State Department said. “Labeling the United States a ‘FIMI threat’ – a term normally reserved for describing influence operations of adversaries – undermines shared goals and should alarm those involved.”

Thanks for confirming that “disinfo” can only ever come from entities that you don’t like and depends on the source rather than a critical assessment of the info itself.

To be fair, it’s worth defining terms. “Disinformation” seems to be a convenient catch-all phrase used by the Western establishment to marginalize a wide range of discourse – from adverse opinions that contradict the establishment’s own mass mind-bending efforts, to straight-up nonsense. The fact that they don’t make enough of a distinction between those two things is to their discredit. There’s a rather significant difference between someone challenging an official narrative and someone insisting that the planet is run by a cabal of lizard people. But both have become fodder for the same sprawling industry of experts and other taxpayer-funded initiatives.

Before the internet and social media, the average person didn’t need some Western apparatchik to tell them that the guy ranting on the street corner was a nutjob. Or to know that states have a tendency to spin in their own self-interest. Or to take whatever you hear around the water cooler at work with a grain of salt. But apparently, now that we’re all connected online, everyone’s brains have gone to mush and we need self-appointed babysitters to tell us what to think under the pretext of protecting us. And certainly not just protecting their power, surely. The public, once trusted to exercise a modicum of judgment, has been demoted to a classroom of toddlers who would eat the crayons the minute they’re unsupervised.

Washington’s spin didn’t start with Trump. It’s just that it’s now so glaring that not even America’s friends can play along with it. Like his framing of the current French leftist riots as being caused by migrants and Islamists, despite French intelligence plainly stating that it’s the annual leftist activist effort. But hey, it suits Israel’s routine framing of everything in every country as being about Islam, which seems to be a big objective of Trump these days – keeping Israel and his Israeli donors like Miriam Adelson and Republican Israeli-backed think tanks happy.

See what I did there? Countered some info with other info. Not hard, right? And all without adult supervision. Unlike some folks who have made a career out of demanding that everyone else show their work, and clearly aren’t especially keen on having to ask the same of Trump’s America. But instead of showing up to their own conference and accepting the obvious – that Trump contradicts himself every five minutes all day long – it turns out that some of these guardians of information integrity ultimately decided that the cause wasn’t so critical to democracy that it was worth a Trump-grade headache.

Guess it’s a lot easier to keep lecturing the powerless than risk inconveniencing the powerful. What a stunning profile in courage from our fearless Western leaders. One might even call it a double standard. Although perhaps they should convene a panel before deciding, lest it qualify as disinfo.

https://rt-english.com/news/647052-eu-anti-disinfo-us/

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