Tauno Tõhk
Research Fellow
October 15, 2026
Suppression by Compliance: What Three Taped-Over Logos Tell Europe About Defending Its Information Space
On a conference banner for #Disinfo2026, the logos of the European External Action Service (EEAS), Lithuania, and Canada were taped over with white, slightly see-through paper, leaving France as the sole government publicly sponsoring the event.
The optics and symbolism matter more than whether money has actually been withdrawn. After pressure from the United States, the EEAS, Lithuania, and Canada scrambled to distance themselves from #Disinfo2026 in Vilnius, a civil-society conference on foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) organised by the non-profit EU DisinfoLab. The panel in the middle of the dispute asked whether the US had become a FIMI threat to Europe. The episode has the structure of transnational information suppression, with democratic governments as the targets that have complied.
This chain of events calls into question the EU’s credibility in countering FIMI. The incident is less about whether civil society will have any support for US-focused investigations and more about whether it can feel that the EU backs FIMI work at all.
Suppression is Manipulation
Manipulating an information environment is broader than promoting disinformation narratives and building the infrastructure to do so. A state actor can also use suppression as a tactic outside its borders by working to remove narratives and voices. Over the years, we have seen China and Russia do exactly that.
For Beijing in particular, information suppression is an integral part of the FIMI arsenal. There is barely any hope of tackling Chinese information manipulation unless we address information suppression. Pressuring foreign academics by denying visas, inviting them to tea at Chinese embassies, restricting foreign companies’ access to its market for publicly raising certain issues, and removing speakers from panels under threat of cancelling cooperation agreements — this is just a sample of China’s transnational information suppression repertoire. The goal is not only to settle the case at hand but to set an example, so that others know what to do to avoid trouble in the future. The message is: Don’t go against China.
In its 2026 FIMI threat report, the EEAS itself highlights transnational information suppression as a key concern in Chinese FIMI:
“Often overlooked and difficult to track, as both threats and incentives aim to induce wide-spread self-censorship, information suppression manipulates the information environment by silencing authentic critical voices. […] By targeting media, businesses, civil society, academia and even governments, but also (diaspora) individuals and their families, information suppression straddles the policy areas of FIMI, human rights, and broader non-traditional security.”
Plausible deniability is part of the process, which makes it difficult to be certain, when looking at a single incident, whether an actor is engaged in suppression. Was someone denied a visa because of their criticism? Or for some other reason? Is a remark at a tea party a ‘friendly’ suggestion, or a warning? To achieve certainty, one needs to look at patterns: if a considerable proportion of researchers on China have had the same experience, the pattern becomes evidence.
A Pattern in Washington
In the US, another pattern seems to be emerging. To detect and decode it, one should look at the administration’s behaviour at home, which reveals its intentions towards the outside world.
Domestically, it began to take shape on the day of President Trump’s second inauguration, when he signed an executive order ending federal funding for disinformation research. Soon, the State Department’s Office for Countering Foreign Disinformation (R/FIMI, formerly the Global Engagement Center) was shut down. Alongside efforts to stifle critical media, visa restrictions on disinformation researchers followed, though courts have paused them for now.
Abroad, the 2025 US National Security Strategy named “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” a policy priority. The administration and its allies have echoed Russian disinformation narratives and have campaigned for illiberal candidates in European elections. Meanwhile, the State Department redirected funding towards promoting right-wing causes in Europe.
Now, back to Vilnius. A State Department cable tasked US embassies with raising concerns about the conference — verbally rather than in writing — and to assess whether the governments involved agreed with the characterisation of the US as a FIMI actor. Three sponsors — the EEAS, Lithuania, and Canada — responded by requesting that mentions of them be removed from the banner; France did not.
A State Department spokesperson later said it should surprise no one that countries would disaffiliate from a conference that had “labelled” the US a FIMI threat. Yet despite its blunt title, the panel the US objected to was framed as a question, not a verdict. The description called it one of the field’s most uncomfortable questions. The sponsors’ public explanations were careful. The EEAS said the organisers had framed some discussions in ways that “do not align with the official positions held by the EU,” a standard the EU rarely applies to civil-society initiatives it supports. Lithuania’s foreign ministry said much the same. Canada said that, following changes to the framing of several panels, it had revised its participation in those sessions. No speakers withdrew, and the panels went ahead as scheduled. The adjustments were made by the governments and institutions.
The signs are now frequent and systematic enough to justify the debate about whether the US is a FIMI actor. Given America’s reach in the global information environment and the resources available to Washington, if the US were to behave as a FIMI actor, its scale could be unlike anything any other actor could achieve. This is why the FIMI defender community cannot ignore the question, even if governments are hesitant to ask it.
Making an Example
This incident underscores the need for a discussion on whether the US, under its current administration, has indeed turned from a FIMI defender into a FIMI actor. It also proves that this question can be costly to ask, which is precisely the calculation suppression wants to introduce.
Self-censorship rarely feels like self-censorship — it feels like a practical decision not to undermine a financial or political relationship.
What further complicates things is that suppression aims to make an example of someone. If an event loses sponsorship because of the topics it covers, others who depend on similar funding sources might find it rational to avoid such topics in the future without any prompting at all. Self-censorship rarely feels like self-censorship — it feels like a practical decision not to undermine a financial or political relationship. This is partly the logic on which information suppression runs. The result, in this case, could be a Europe less resilient to FIMI from any actor.
Whose Side are Governments on?
It is clear to everyone that the relationship with the current US administration is full of policy and diplomatic dilemmas, and it can often seem that there are only bad choices on the table. But whatever adverse outcomes the institutions and governments involved hoped to avoid when dealing with the Trump administration, the home front paid a price. At least some of the trust of the civil-society community — the trust that the EEAS’s threat report describes as essential to defending democracies against FIMI — has been lost. Two days after the conference in Vilnius ended, Washington waived sanctions on Russian diesel to ease fuel prices before the midterm congressional elections. Whether the three sponsors would have made the same calculation if they had known which decisions the Trump administration would make in the following days is a fair question.
Some matters are politically or diplomatically sensitive and cannot be tackled by public institutions. That is exactly why a whole-of-society response is needed. But it becomes harder to build one if institutions that drive that approach withdraw after the first signs of serious pressure. The EEAS says that countering FIMI will require a whole-of-society approach and a strong international partnership. In Vilnius, the partnership was the first casualty.
Expecting civil-society events to reflect the EU’s official positions is not standard EU practice. Civil society and other stakeholders should have the freedom to discuss questions that public institutions cannot. Safeguarding the integrity of the information space is the first pillar of the European Democracy Shield, and EU member states adopted follow-up conclusions recognising that an independent and resilient civil society contributes to democratic resilience.
One may argue that the question of whether the US is a FIMI actor belongs elsewhere, not at an event sponsored by the EEAS, Canada, Lithuania, and France. But since US counter-FIMI funding has collapsed, the list of alternatives is ever shorter.
Earlier this year, a US congressional report already published the names of EU NGO staff unredacted, while the Commission stayed largely silent. Can civil-society actors — who might now be targeted not only by China and Russia but also by the US — rely on their own governments for support?
Efforts to counter a threat the EU itself ranks among its primary hybrid threats have become sensitive because of pressure from a country that is still nominally an Ally.
The Task
This episode should not lead to dwindling support for such conferences and the FIMI defender community. It should instead bring longer-term commitments. The Democracy Shield offers hope for more resources for civil society. Any such funding should be accompanied by a clear and public commitment that the EU and governments will not have a veto over the substance as long as it does not conflict with the EU’s fundamental values. Official positions do not equal fundamental values.
Explaining the decision regarding the Vilnius conference, an EEAS spokesperson said that supporting “free and open discussion” at civil-society FIMI events remains important. That should be the guiding principle for how the EU handles similar situations in the future.
One More Anaconda
There is a figure of speech by Perry Link, a China scholar, which describes self-censorship in China: an anaconda in the chandelier.
“Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments.”
For any organisation working on FIMI in Europe and beyond, the question is now whether there is one more anaconda in the chandelier.
Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).
