Dear Readers,

Thank you for joining us again for the Disinfo Update, the bi-weekly newsletter dedicated to providing resources for the counter-disinformation community in Europe and beyond. 

We are back from #Disinfo2026, held in Vilnius, which once again served as a platform for our community to meet, discuss the most pressing questions, and explore potential solutions and responses.

If you haven’t followed the coverage of the conference, we encourage you to review two resources for more in-depth information: the Guardian and France 24. We are thankful for the support and kind words we received. We are also grateful to the community members who are actively pushing for greater accountability regarding the conference, ensuring that European civil society cannot be silenced, threatened, or undermined, and that a proper democracy remains intact.

Our thoughts also go out to our colleagues at the International Criminal Court, who have been put under United States sanctions just after the announcement that a former ICC judge, Navanethem Pillay, had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

That being said, we are carrying on with our normal activities, including our regular webinar series. As a reminder, our webinars are now only available for those registered on the DisinfoHub. Make sure to sign up early enough (as we review all registrations), and with your professional email address, to be able to join our next webinars and follow our other activities. 

Thank you very much, and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Sincerely, 

The EU DisinfoLab team

NATIONAL INITIATIVES: DEFENCE AND COURTS

Governments are setting up dedicated structures to counter disinformation, from foreign interference to campaigns targeting national economic interests.

  • Poland launches a national centre to counter disinformation, whose new head Paweł Olszewski (former deputy digitisation minister) names far-right politician Grzegorz Braun and the pro-Russian Kamraty movement as threats to state security. (Polskie Radio)
  • Austria plans a Centre of Excellence Against Foreign Information Manipulation, modelled on the Finnish Hybrid CoE, to counter Russian influence in Central Europe. (Vindobona)
  • France creates an “information strike force” to combat disinformation targeting French companies and their reputation abroad. (French Embassy in the UK)
  • The UK’s new National Centre for Information Defence, welcomed by analysts, is already facing coordinated “censorship” attacks, with calls for the government to spell out what it will and won’t do. (The Wayfinder / Unfit Critic)

National courts and regulators are being tested as DSA enforcers.

  • Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has failed in a High Court bid challenging how the Irish media regulator, Comisiún na Meán, deals with user complaints against social media platforms.  (The Irish Times)
  • Montenegro’s parliament adopts a law implementing the DSA ahead of EU accession, naming its audiovisual media agency as Digital Services Coordinator. (Obsidian)
  • Alliance4Europe sues Meta in a Hamburg court for refusing to reimburse its costs after winning an out-of-court dispute over RT DE content. (MLex)
  • AlgorithmWatch details how its DSA data access requests have been stalled by slow regulatory processes and platform pushback, calling on regulators to triage requests and act against non-compliant platforms. (DSA Observatory)

Regulatory enforcement and platform governance

Pressure is mounting on Brussels and national capitals to make EU digital rules work in practice.

  • Under the DSA, the European Commission levied a fine of €120 million to Elon Musk’s X in late 2025. This has prompted an ongoing MAGA coalition to wage a campaign in Europe to sabotage regulation efforts. (Corporate Europe Observatory)
  • Macron says the DSA is not enforced with its full power, calling for “much faster, much harder” enforcement and stressing the role of fact-checkers in restoring the facts. (Élysée) 
  • The Commission sends Bulgaria an additional letter of formal notice for failing to empower all its DSA enforcement authorities and for sanctioning rules that breach the DSA’s limits. (European Commission)
  • The Commission launches a pilot European repository for online political ads under the Political Advertising Regulation, giving researchers and the public access to information on sponsors, spending and targeting. (European Commission) 

Meanwhile, platforms are failing to apply their own rules on climate disinformation.

  • YouTube demonetised fewer than 5% of reported climate disinformation videos and TikTok reversed none of its decisions on appeal, as both platforms’ risk assessments overlook climate-related systemic risks. (Fundación Maldita.es / Science Feedback)

The online advertising ecosystem is also proving a gateway for surveillance.

  • Citizen Lab confirms the first zero-click spyware attacks delivered via targeted ads, infecting devices at Al Jazeera through Discover-Tech, an Israeli firm listed as a “certified” vendor by Google and IAB Europe until this month. (Citizen Lab)

Influence operations

New research maps Russian propaganda as infrastructure, from Kremlin-run programmes to automated website networks and new media outlets in the Sahel.

  • A Swedish Psychological Defence Agency report maps 70 entities and programmes under Kremlin official Sergey Kiriyenko, with an annual budget of €1.4–1.8bn, linking domestic indoctrination, digital surveillance and foreign interference. (Psychological Defence Agency)
  • A study of 5.2 million articles across 147 Pravda network sites finds that 96.5% of their sources are Telegram channels, describing an “always-on” propaganda infrastructure that may also feed search engines and AI models, and slips through DSA gaps. (Journal of Information Technology & Politics)
  • Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger launch Tafouk TV, a Russian-backed channel that has signed a cooperation agreement with RT’s parent company, as part of a wider push to counter Western media. (RFI)

Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex data centres sparked viral claims that Russian bots had gone silent, showing how hard it is to assess influence operations in real time.

  • After Ukrainian drones hit three Yandex data centres, claims that Russian bot activity had plummeted spread widely, amplified by President Zelenskyy and a MEP, although the traffic data cited included search-engine crawlers. (Euronews)
  • Analyses find no evidence the strikes silenced Russian propaganda bots: activity in the AfD, MAGA and Reform UK communities named in viral posts held steady, and the charts cited measured automated web traffic, not social media accounts. (Graphika / Snopes)
  • In Lithuania, high-risk pro-Russian content actually peaked during the outage, as influence operations rely on residential proxies and phone farms rather than data centres. (Mykolas Katkus)
  • EDMO’s fact-checking network reports a mixed picture and no conclusive evidence that the strikes curbed pro-Russian accounts, calling on authorities to publish any data behind their claims. (EDMO)

AI Disinfo Watch

AI agents: harm and discussions on accountability. Some recent cases show how AI agents can harm online infrastructure and expose users’ private data. As AI agent incidents grow, the debate is shifting from “the model misbehaved” to “who is responsible.” In the meantime, regulators and state attorneys are starting to test whether existing consumer protection laws can hold AI companies liable.

  • Rogue OpenAI agents found on Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation)
  • Meta’s AI agent Muse gives out a user’s home address (The Guardian)
  • Muse creates detailed profiles of all your friends and family (WIRED)
  • The UN’s AI panel sees misalignment. We see corporate (mis)behavior (Tech Policy Press)
  • FTC opens probe into AI giants (Yahoo/Reuters)
  • Florida asks court to halt ChatGPT development (Axios)

European AI Act compliance and legal pressure in the USA. New rules, especially the EU AI Act, are pushing companies to label AI-generated content: OpenAI and Google announced new measures to comply. Meanwhile, legal pressure over product harms lead Character.AI to bankruptcy, while courts are starting to receive cases of deepfakes of candidates in the US midterms.

  • OpenAI’s approach to EU text provenance rules (OpenAI)
  • Google expands SynthID Detector globally (Google)
  • Character.AI files for bankruptcy (CNN)
  • AI campaign deepfakes start to draw legal threats (Axios)

New research on AI for FIMI, manipulation of LLMs and harm. New studies show how AI is being used in foreign influence operations, including campaigns aimed at Latin America. They also show how AI-generated misinformation is causing real harm in the UK and how threat actors exploit data voids to manipulate LLMs.

Language matters in AI Governance. The words we use for AI shape how the public understands it. The White House’s switch from “Artificial Intelligence” to “Super Intelligence” is less a technical correction than a narrative strategy. Key decisions about AI are being made in closed meetings between executives and officials, with little public input.

  • Trump’s post on “Super Intelligence” (Truth Social)
  • Fact sheet: The era of Super Intelligence (White House)
  • Trump says AI giants have agreed to “police themselves” (ABC News)
  • AI governance is being decided now, and the public isn’t in the room (Tech Policy Press)

Explore more in our recently updated AI Disinfo Hub, where we gather the latest research, tools, and analysis on AI-driven disinformation.

Identity-based disinformation

Disinformation targeting minorities persists in media coverage, as attitudes towards them harden.

  • A Roma Shield report analysing Polish press articles and public figures’ Facebook posts found nearly a quarter contained gender- and identity-based disinformation (GIBD), reinforcing stereotypes about Romani women and men. (Home of the Borderland Foundation)
  • Acceptance of homosexuality among Dutch teenagers has fallen sharply since 2021, to 51% of girls and 22% of boys, with researchers pointing to disinformation campaigns and manosphere content, though no causal link is established. (NOS News)

BRUSSELS CORNER

Nearly 600 organisations call on EU Council to reverse proposed cuts to AgoraEU

On 14 October, nearly 600 civil society organisations published a joint letter urging the European Council to reverse the 30% cut to AgoraEU proposed by the sitting Council Presidency. As AgoraEU is the programme that will fund democracy and civil society under the next EU budget, the signatories argue that this cut would undermine the civil society organisations on which Europe’s digital ambitions depend. (CDT)

EESC draft opinion calls for long-term EU funding for civil society

On 21-22 October, the European Economic and Social Committee will vote in plenary on its opinion on “Inclusive Democratic Participation: Promoting Civil Society in Communities.” The draft opinion examines the importance of civil society for democracy, and recommends better funding for civil society organisations in the next EU budget. A key amendment calls for an independent endowment for democracy, with long-term funding from the EU and Member States and a stronger AgoraEU programme.(EESC)

Council publishes conclusions on the European Democracy Shield

The Council published its conclusions on the European Democracy Shield on 13 October, and held an exchange of views with the European Parliament’s special committee on the Democracy Shield on 5 October. (Council of the EU)

Thomas Byrne, Irish Minister of State for European Affairs, pointed to the committee’s finding that “the credibility of the shield rests on the will to enforce the legislation we already have” as “the finding that has drawn most attention to this council” and as “a standard to be met.” This echoes the calls from both the Parliament and the Member States in the EU Council, reported in our last newsletter, for stronger enforcement of the DSA. (EUDS Committee)

Explore the full Brussels Corner on our website.

🧡 A couple things we loved

Nina Jankowicz, “Trump’s Free Speech Warriors Were Afraid of a Conference,” (The Wayfinder) 

Jeanne Sulzer, “Two Targets, One Tactic as US Sanctions ICC and Silences #Disinfo2026,” (TechPolicy)

📚 Recommended pick

This week’s recommended read comes from our Project Officer, Lukas Ameel. Lukas recommends reading “Does Claude Feel the Whip? The Case for Being Polite to AI Has Nothing to Do with the AI”, an essay written by Yaniv Regev published in Noema Magazine.

On 8 October, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, announced an update to its usage policy, stating that users who behave abusively or cruelly towards the chatbot may be banned from the platform. The Flemish public broadcaster VRT published an article about this update entitled “Anyone who is rude to Claude will be banned from the chatbot: can AI really feel hurt?”, suggesting that the policy change was driven by the question of whether AI can have feelings and can be hurt by users’ behaviour.

But is the possibility of AI consciousness really the reason behind this decision, or does it miss the point? Perhaps the more important question is why we should treat AI with respect in the first place. In his essay, Yaniv Regev explores this through philosophical arguments and practical examples, offering a thought-provoking reflection on how we interact with AI and what our behaviour towards it says about us.

“Thank your robot for the same reason Kant told his students not to shoot the old dog that had served faithfully – not for the animal’s sake, but for the sake of the person you are becoming.”

🔎 Our latest work

  • DisinfoHub is live. Our new members’ platform is now the single place to access community-only content, webinars, conference materials, publications and updates, with new resources added regularly. Sign-in is passwordless: just register, get approved, and you’ll receive a secure login link by email. Create your DisinfoHub account!
  • Call for venues #Disinfo2028. With #Disinfo2027 already in the works, we’re now scouting host cities for our 2028 annual conference. If your organisation or city would like to be considered, get in touch by replying to this email.

💬 EU DisinfoLab webinars

Registration for all our webinars now happens through DisinfoHub, our new community platform.

Once registered, you’ll be able to sign up for sessions, receive your personal webinar link, and access recordings, resources and community-only content.

As we review all sign-ups manually, approval may take some time, so please register early to make sure you don’t miss a session!

Missed a session? Find the recordings of all past webinars on DisinfoHub.

Register here to get access.

🧰 Tools & Learning

Curious about using AI in your investigations?

Indicator has launched the Indicator Lab, a paid add-on to its Pro membership that bundles five AI tools for investigators: research agents that trace every claim to a source, change monitoring with evidence archiving, a searchable catalogue of over 13,000 OSINT tools, data visualisation, and a desktop interface that can run everything locally for sensitive work. Membership includes monthly workshops and office hours. Explore the Lab.

🗓️ Events on our radar

🤝 Jobs & opportunities

SUBSCRIBE TO THIS NEWSLETTER !

Have something to share – an event, job opening, publication? Send your suggestions via the “get in touch” form below, and we’ll consider them for the next edition of Disinfo Update.