Ships are framed by pieces of melting sea ice in Frobisher Bay in Iqaluit in 2019. A Canadian official was slated to chair a session on disinformation in the Arctic.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The federal government has withdrawn its sponsorship of an anti-disinformation conference in Lithuania that features panels talking about the United States as a foreign-interference threat.
Global Affairs spokesperson Samantha Lafleur said Ottawa wasn’t comfortable with the framing of some of the panels and that Canadian officials will still take part in the conference but will not chair any discussions.
“Following changes to the framing of several panel discussions, Global Affairs decided to revise its participation in those sessions at the EU DisinfoLab 2026 conference,” Ms. Lafleur said in an e-mailed statement.
The U.S. State Department criticized the conference for proposing that the United States is a source of foreign interference and manipulated information.
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“The organizers appear to put the United States in the same bucket as foreign adversaries,” the department said in an e-mailed statement. “This false equivalence is antithetical to the goals these individuals claim to promote and obscures the scale and nature of adversarial interference.”
Asked if Washington raised concerns about Disinfo2026 with Canada and European countries, it declined to say.
“The Department does not discuss details of private diplomatic conversations, but we regularly and candidly engage our European and Canadian partners on concerns and avenues for collaboration regarding censorship, free expression, and countering adversaries,” the State Department said.
An annual conference on countering disinformation, the 2026 event is taking place in Vilnius this week. The conference attracts researchers, people who work in counter-disinformation, journalists, think tanks, academics and government officials. It is organized by EU DisinfoLab, a non-profit based in Brussels.
One of the featured attendees this year was Kimberly Prost, the Canadian jurist hit by sanctions from U.S. President Donald Trump for her work on an International Criminal Court case involving American troops in Afghanistan.
She was one of five judges who decided unanimously in 2020 to authorize an investigation into war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan by the Taliban, Afghan forces and members of the U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency, which operated secret detention facilities.
At Disinfo2026, more than one panel discusses the U.S. as a source of foreign-information manipulation and interference (FIMI), in which state-backed actors conduct co-ordinated and deceptive behaviour to sway public debate and undermine elections and institutions.
The conference program frames one session, slated for Thursday, as a provocative discussion on “growing evidence that the United States has, in specific Arctic contexts, operated as a FIMI actor.”
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Saliou Babou, the director of a Global Affairs Canada unit that was set up years ago to counter foreign state-sponsored disinformation, was slated to chair a session on disinformation in the Arctic.
The Lithuanian government also said it withdrew its sponsorship. “Lithuania has cancelled its participation in ‘Disinfo 2026′ as several parts of the conference programme differ from the official position of the Government,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania said in an e-mailed statement.
In addition, participants told JOBFlocks that the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic service, withdrew its sponsorship.
The Disinfo2026 conference organizers declined to comment.
The Global Affairs spokesperson said Canada remains committed to combatting disinformation.
“We respect the right of the organizers to frame discussions as they see fit and recognize the independence of civil society actors and speakers at the conference,” Ms. Lafleur said.
Benjamin Shultz, a lead researcher at the American Sunlight Project and a conference participant, said posters at the conference listing sponsors now feature white stickers covering the logas for Canada, Lithuania and the EU.
Mr. Shultz disputed the Canadian government’s statement that panel subjects had been “reframed,” saying the description of the panels is unchanged from a June, 2026, version.
One of the conference sessions was titled “USA as a FIMI threat: acknowledge, adapt, push back,” referring to foreign-information manipulation and interference. The description said the discussion would address: “one of the most uncomfortable questions in the counter-disinformation field today: how did the United States become a FIMI threat for Europe?”
Canada drops sponsorship of conference that talks of U.S. as foreign interference actor
Another panel titled “Under attack: How the counter-disinformation community is dealing with US government pressure,” talked about how Washington imposed visa restrictions on five Europeans, among them former EU commissioner Thierry Breton and four leaders of groups that combat online disinformation and hate, accusing them of putting pressure on U.S. social-media platforms to censor American speech.
“The United States Government’s attacks to intimidate individuals and organisations are an unprecedented escalation in defense of U.S. corporations seeking to avoid regulation and criticism,” the panel description said.
The U.S. State Department in its statement rejected the idea that it’s a source of foreign-information manipulation and interference.
“For too long, governments have exploited the pretext of combatting ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ for politically motivated reasons,” the department said. “We continue to counter malign foreign propaganda; we also recognize the importance of distinguishing adversarial campaigns from the political opinions and positions of our domestic speakers and allied countries.”
With a report from Nathan VanderKlippe