The Atlantic Council's speech police handed Twitter 40,000 real accounts to silence.
Now they're headlining a conference in Lithuania that declared the entire United States a foreign threat.
And the European governments paying for this circus quietly covered their own names before anyone noticed.
EU DisinfoLab Put America in the Same Category as Russia and China
EU DisinfoLab held its annual conference – #Disinfo2026 – in Vilnius, Lithuania on October 7 and 8.
Day one featured a panel called "USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back."
FIMI means foreign information manipulation and interference – the same designation Europe applies to Russian and Chinese operations.
The conference program asked how "the United States became a FIMI threat for Europe" and promised to explore how these organizations could "rebuild resilience without Washington."
One of the featured speakers was Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab – the same organization that sent Twitter 40,000 accounts to purge as suspected political operatives.
Twitter's own trust and safety chief Yoel Roth reviewed the list and found virtually all of them were real people.
A second panel on October 8 also presented "growing evidence that the United States has, in specific Arctic contexts, operated as a FIMI actor."
The United States – the country that rebuilt Europe after two world wars – is now being classified alongside Communist China influence operations.
EU Governments Funded the Anti-America Conference Then Tried to Remove Their Names From It
The EU has given EU DisinfoLab about €1.1 million in research grants.
That includes €212,500 from ATHENA – a Horizon Europe project specifically built to defend Europe "against foreign information manipulation and interference."
The event's original sponsors included the EU's own diplomatic service, Global Affairs Canada, and Lithuania's foreign ministry.
Days before the conference opened, those logos quietly disappeared from the website.
On the printed materials handed out in the room, staff covered the government logos with white stickers.
Lithuania's foreign ministry claimed it pulled support because "several parts of the conference programme differ from the official position of the Government."
The EU's diplomatic service said something nearly identical – the organizers had framed their discussions in ways that didn't align with official EU positions.
Neither statement mentioned the part that mattered: the money kept flowing anyway.
They were embarrassed to be publicly associated with calling America a foreign adversary – but not embarrassed enough to actually stop.
Washington Hit Back
The State Department pushed back directly, saying that labeling the United States a "FIMI threat" – a designation Europe reserves for foreign adversaries – "undermines shared goals and should alarm those involved."
Washington also confirmed it had thanked Lithuania for "taking US concerns seriously."
That response came on the heels of Rubio's December 2025 visa bans targeting five figures he called leaders of the "global censorship-industrial complex," including Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index – the organization that built advertising blacklists flagging The Federalist, Newsmax, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, and The Blaze as high-risk disinformation sites.
GDI received hundreds of thousands in American taxpayer money through the State Department's own Global Engagement Center before Rubio shut that pipeline down.
The censors who spent years starving conservative media of ad revenue are now complaining they face a "chilling effect" – the exact phrase they weaponized against conservatives for years.
The Censorship Industrial Complex Just Admitted What It Always Was
These organizations built a lucrative global industry out of labeling speech they disliked as "disinformation" – and the money flowed freely as long as the targets were conservatives, Christians, or anyone who challenged the wrong people.
The Atlantic Council, EU DisinfoLab, and the Global Disinformation Index are funded political operations that spent years building the machinery to silence American voices.
The moment an American administration said the censorship runs both ways, they declared America itself the foreign threat.
That's not a policy disagreement – that's a confession.
Sources:
- Cindy Harper, "EU-Funded 'Disinformation' Group Puts America on Its Threat List," Reclaim the Net, October 12, 2026.
- "State Department Imposes Visa Sanctions on Individuals for Alleged Online Censorship," Immigration Policy Tracking Project, December 23, 2025.
- "Judge Halts US Visa Restrictions on Disinformation Gurus Accused of Censorship," The Epoch Times, July 2025.
- "Key Group in Government-Linked Censorship Network Boasted of Defunding News Outlets," Reclaim the Net, 2024.
- Rep. Michael McCaul et al., "Letter to Secretary Blinken Regarding the Global Engagement Center," House Foreign Affairs Committee, May 1, 2023.
