US pressured EU to withdraw sponsorship of disinformation conference

The European Union on Wednesday withdrew sponsorship of a disinformation event scheduled to be held in Lithuania that day, citing concerns that the framing of some discussions did not align with its official positions.

The conference, #Disinfo2026, is the annual meetup of Europe’s counter-disinformation community and usually draws hundreds of researchers, journalists, technologists, and policymakers to a hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania.

An independent Brussels non-profit, EU Disinfo Lab, runs it.

The event, held in Vilnius on 7-8 October 2026, was publicly advertised since at least April, and its programme has been available online since 9 September, long before the EU’s last-minute withdrawal.

The EU foreign affairs division, the European External Action Service (EEAS), along with Canada and Lithuania, withdrew support at short notice. As a result, sponsors’ logos on flyers and placards at the event were hastily covered over with paper strips.

“We were not comfortable with the framing of some of the discussions at the event. The organisers chose to frame some of the discussions in a way which does not align with the official positions held by the EU,” EU spokesperson Christian Wigand told reporters in Brussels.

However, a Guardian report attributed the decision to pressure from US State Department officials over a panel framing the US as a foreign information threat.

That panel is called “USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back.” FIMI refers to “foreign information manipulation and interference.”

The paper, citing EU sources and the US State Department, said it had contacted multiple governments about their support for the conference.

State Department officials focused on the panel, which included three American speakers, one of whom was a former CIA officer. They sought to discuss how Europe’s disinformation community could rebuild resilience without Washington.

The undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, is said to be behind the US action.

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The Guardian reported that the conference appears to be the first to entertain the idea that the US could be a disinformation actor in Europe.

It also quoted internal State Department documents showing officials thanking Lithuania for taking America’s concerns seriously.

The paper reported that the US was “grateful” to Lithuania, while Lithuania, the US, and Canada found the framing “reprehensible and surprising.”

Meanwhile, Lithuania, while announcing its decision to withdraw from the programme, said, “several parts of the conference programme differ from the official position of the Government.”

Canada also said, “It carefully assesses participation in, and sponsorship of, external events on a case-by-case basis,” and that after observing “changes to the framing of several panel discussions, it has decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference.”