Transnational Disinformation: A Galaxy of Manipulation

“Caught in the act” – this is how a video went viral in 2025 that was intended to give the impression that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had been caught with “a bag of cocaine”. However, it turned out that the item was not a bag of cocaine, but simply a tissue.

Misinformation is now spreading rapidly across continents. The report in question circulated in Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, the United States, Australia and possibly other countries. It fits into the narrative that accuses the Ukrainian president and his allies of using cocaine, something that has already been refuted several times.

15 journalists from 12 Latin American countries are taking part in the “Euromérica” workshop organized by the taz panter foundation. It's about the opportunities and challenges of the EU-Mercosur agreement and Latin American-European relations. A supplement will appear in the taz on December 5th, and there will be a public talk in the taz canteen on December 9th. All texts can be found here.

These cases are foreign-controlled operations to manipulate the flow of information and are known as Fimi (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference). “Galaxia” is the name under which the EU project EUvsDisinfo presents a data visualization of disinformation that is allegedly linked to Fimi. The EU project recorded 19,813 cases of targeted disinformation between 2015 and 2026.

His visualization shows a complex, galaxy-like network of connections between countries, actors and operations. “Fimi is an attempt to manipulate public opinion in one country from another through social networks, algorithms and AI,” explains Brazilian journalist Beatriz Farrugia. She works as a Fimi analyst for Debunk, a Lithuanian nonprofit, and as a disinformation researcher for the Brazilian fact-checking agency Lupa.

Farrugia suggests distinguishing Fimi from traditional political interference, as the former seeks to influence people's opinions through deliberately "covert" online operations. The term Fimi was introduced by the EU, according to which external interference “represents a growing threat to the security and foreign policy of the European Union”.

The EU identifies Russia and China as key players in Fimi operations. However, experts point out that there are of course other actors. “The fact that campaigns of certain countries are not exposed does not mean that there are none,” says Coral García Dorado, research coordinator at Maldita.es, a Spanish foundation that investigates Fimi operations. However, the campaigns often cannot be assigned to a specific country.

However, their goals are often similar: “to manipulate elections, to stir up distrust in institutions, to divide society or to promote their own interests in other countries,” says Dorado. Fimi often uses disinformation to achieve this, but this is not their only tactic. It also resorts to fake accounts or the artificial creation of trends. The procedure is usually so complex that several of these methods are used at the same time.

In the pro-Russian Operation Over Load/Matryoshka, which was launched in September 2023, fact-checkers and media outlets were flooded with fake content in order to disrupt their work. It is active in Europe and Latin America, including Bolivia and Germany.

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Operation Portal Kombat/Red Pravda is also a large-scale Russian disinformation campaign. One of its main goals is to spread fake news and pro-Russian propaganda in Europe in various languages, particularly French, German, Spanish and English. She even managed to influence AI chatbots that were used to generate responses.

Meanwhile, the Argentine portal La Derecha Diario, a right-wing extremist propaganda outlet, spread false information this year about a wave of immigration from Morocco that supposedly reached Brazil. The posts came primarily from accounts in Argentina, Brazil and the United States.

With so much foreign influence online, a debate about how we can better protect ourselves from them is urgently needed. One problem is that there are currently no international agreements classifying Fimi as illegal.

The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) aims to curb disinformation by requiring large platforms to assess the risks of their algorithms and systems. But Fimi is not discussed specifically.

According to journalist Farrugia, Fimi operations exploit this legal loophole. It is therefore important to better protect the sovereignty of individual countries in the digital information space. The EUvsDisinfo research project proposes a series of measures: regulate political advertising on the Internet, identify state-controlled media, make AI-generated content transparent and demand more responsibility from digital platforms.

It also makes sense to join forces and forge alliances in order to analyze Fimi on a transnational level and develop effective counter-strategies. In the meantime, as a fact-checker, I have no other option but to continue researching and educating the public about this complex galaxy.

Lucas Llanes is a Bolivian journalist and fact checker at ChequeaBolivia.

Translated from Spanish by Ole Schulz