EU, Canada, and Lithuania withdraw from disinformation conference following US pressure

FIMI is an EU term denoting activities that seek to distort information available to the public—such as the online dissemination of disinformation.

It is typically used to describe the influence of foreign powers, such as Russia. According to the US State Department's position, the conference lumped the US together with foreign adversaries such as China and Russia—an inappropriate comparison that obscures the scale of Russian and Chinese interference in democratic systems.

The demand to withdraw participation appears to be an unusual attempt by the Trump administration to pressure allies into silencing criticism from European citizens and Americans living abroad. Three US citizens participated in one of the panels.

Recipients of the US State Department's request included US embassies in France, Norway, Romania, and Poland. The embassies were asked to verbally convey to the host countries that the U.S. was displeased with the panels regarding U.S. disinformation.

One panel—titled "USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back"—featured two American researchers and a former Central Intelligence Agency employee, examining how the US has become a source of disinformation threatening Europe. Another panel involved legal experts assessing US government travel bans imposed on European officials. A US official familiar with the matter said