Russia Today is training a new generation of journalists — and other notes from Disinfo2025

Ljubljana — The counter-disinformation community gathered in Ljubljana, Slovenia, for an annual conference this month, toward the end of a year that has seen Meta scrap its fact-checking program, a vaccine skeptic sworn in as U.S. health secretary, and readers increasingly turn to AI chatbots to find information.

Over two days at Disinfo2025, a conference organized by the Brussels nonprofit EU Disinfo Lab, panelists including journalists, attorneys, analysts, and fact-checkers presented the latest developments in the rapidly evolving information landscape. These ranged from foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) and how to build a better economic model for journalism to the risk of online influencers upending peace talks.

Unsurprisingly given the European focus and current geopolitical landscape, Russian malign influence operations took center stage at the event, while there were also frequent discussions among participants about how Europe can forge a path without U.S. support. Looming over the conference was the extraordinary power that Big Tech has concentrated over democracies while profiting from the spread of lies.

From FIMI threats to the weaponization of freedom of speech, here are some of the event’s key takeaways.

Russia’s propaganda machine is evolving

Independent media models are struggling in many parts of the world. In contrast, Russia is throwing its weight behind training journalists, said Pierre Dagard, head of global advocacy at RSF. “In 2022, after the start of the war against Ukraine, Russia opened the War Correspondents’ School in the occupied territories of Ukraine — the goal is to provide training…for future propagandists.”

Jakub Śliż, president of the fact-checking and media literacy organization Pravda, also discussed Moscow’s backing of media training as a way to expand its “soft power” in Africa, referencing the expansion of Russian Houses on the continent. (Critics see the cultural exchange institutions as an arm of Moscow’s disinformation operation.)

“They are training the new wave of journalists, sending ambitious students to Moscow. Most of the CVs I receive have the Russia Today training program,” he said. (RT launched a free international training program in October 2024, reportedly offering trainees an introductory journalism curriculum via learning materials imbued with Kremlin narratives on topics including the war in Ukraine.)

Śliż added that there is widespread Chinese influence on the continent, “and also French disinformation, which is also happening in some [former colonies] like Algeria.”

Sanctions against Russian state media outlets have driven Russia Today and Sputnik to strategically expand to regions with pre-existing “anti-Western” sentiment, including countries in the Sahel region and Serbia, Dagard said. “They’re tasked with shifting from an anti-EU position to a pro-Russia one.”

Through initiatives like the Global Fact Checking Network, Russia is mirroring independent journalism institutions to promote the Kremlin’s narratives, notably about Ukraine. “It looks like a normal fact-changing organization, but it’s funded and directed by organizations and people with clear Kremlin affiliations,” said Dagard.

The Trump administration’s attacks on the media are benefiting the Kremlin, Dagard said. “The decision to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which includes Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, was welcomed by the Kremlin publicly…Fewer independent and reliable sources means there’s more space for Russian propaganda.”

The weaponization of freedom of speech

The Trump administration has the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) in its crosshairs: it has repeatedly attacked the bloc’s social media regulation, claiming it amounts to “censorship,” and even threatened hitting the bloc with tariffs over it.

Christine Allan de Lavenne, the founder of SIDE Law Office, offered a historical view on the diverging ways that freedom of expression is understood in the U.S. and Europe. Whereas the U.S.’s First Amendment grants almost absolute protection to freedom of expression, in Europe, the right is restricted by Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which states that the right “carries with it duties and responsibilities.”

Allan de Lavenne warned that both systems have failed to prevent the “political instrumentalization” of free speech. “This is, sadly, something we see on a daily basis today in the U.S. and the dangerously polarized political system makes it even worse,” she said, adding that its weaponization is being used to “limit and constrain other human rights,” including health.

To Eliška Pírková, global freedom of expression lead at digital rights group Access Now, recent attacks against the DSA often depend on a “selective reading” of the legislation while ignoring its safeguards. While some misunderstandings may arise from the right’s differing conceptions, Pírková said, she believes “a narrative is being instrumentally shaped by those who don’t wish for any accountability, especially when they are contributing or directly causing societal harm.”

Could disrupting the ad tech industry boost revenue for journalism?

In his diagnosis of the immense challenges facing editorial media today, Einar Hålien, editor of the Norwegian media group Schibsted, pointed to factors including insufficient innovation but also a business model that forces it to compete against social media platforms for ad revenue.

Hålien noted “alarmingly high” levels of news avoidance and falling trust in media across most of the EU. “The problem is in the strength of competing forces and the media’s own shortcomings,” he said, adding that publishers “must be format-agnostic” while support could include tax breaks.

For Claire Atkin, the cofounder of digital advertising watchdog Check My Ads, the rise of intermediation is chiefly to blame, with profound consequences for democracy. Whereas once an ad was placed directly with a magazine or newspaper, now ad tech companies handle their placement — which she said offers little transparency and has helped erode media revenues.

“Ad tech claims to get your ad to the right people,” she said, but clients have little control. “This has broken our media system for 20 years.” She called for the ad tech industry to be forced to offer transparency and for it to be comprehensively regulated: “This is about giving advertisers the right to say where their brands go.”

From Aleppo to Gaza: Disinformation in war

Dr. Hamza Al-Kateab, co-founder and CEO of the NGO Action For Sama, was one of the last doctors in Aleppo during its siege, and focused on how media reports and UN and NGO statements blurred responsibility during Syria’s war.

“I consider it disinformation when you use the passive voice…because it helps in erasing the truth, it helps in removing the context,” he said. He also gave examples of statements that urged “all parties” to end attacks on hospitals when “the vast majority were [by] Syrian government and Russian forces.”

Al-Kateab also contrasted the BBC’s language in describing the killings of Palestinians and Israelis during the war in Gaza. He noted that, according to one analysis, Israelis were more likely to be described emotively; Palestinians were more frequently said to have “died” while Israelis were said to have been “killed.”

Separately, Karen Banaa, a project officer at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, a private diplomacy organization, offered insight into how disinformation can jeopardize peace negotiations. Mediators are increasingly “seeing that what happens online impacts what’s happening on the ground,” she said.

She added that the organization now engages in dialogue with social media influencers, who sometimes throw their weight behind political actors, “to try and set standards and norms” against sharing disinformation and hate speech — though she noted they aren’t always followed.

High- and low-tech influence operations

Sviatoslav Hnizdovsky, the founder and CEO of OpenMinds, a tech company focused on countering authoritarian influence, argued that malicious bots are booming — and becoming harder to detect. “Malicious bot traffic has more than doubled in the last decade,” he said, while previous indicators, including comment length, appear increasingly unreliable. Monitoring of Russian bots on Telegram suggests they are succeeding in evading its spam filters while posting prolifically.

Using AI to spew vast quantities of disinformation has long been a key concern as the tech has been rolled out, and Hnizdovsky pointed to research finding that AI-generated propaganda, even with older models, is now “at least as persuasive as human-generated” content.

In the age of LLM manipulation and deepfakes, more low-tech influence techniques can sometimes be overlooked. Alden Wahlstrom, principal analyst for Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, explained that “direct dissemination tactics” use closed communication channels like emails, texts, calls, and even faxes.

Anticipating that AI will increasingly be used in concert with this, Wahlstrom noted that the accessible tactic is “an actor-agnostic tool, used in war and peacetime, against foreign and domestic audiences.” It can also be powerfully intimidating: “It achieves a potentially bigger influence due to the psychological effect of receiving a message somewhere you thought was private.”

Holding Big Tech accountable

Fighting disinformation requires securing long-term economic sustainability of the media, the press rebuilding the public’s trust, and holding platforms accountable for amplifying disinformation, Dagard said. “Platforms…favor their economic interest over the integrity of information on their services — we have to impose it by law and regulation.”

As the conference drew to a close, Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, called on EU and U.K. regulators to enforce their respective pieces of legislation.

“It is now in the hands of the regulators…The reason why the tech oligarchs are coming with their political allies and pushing back on legislation is because they have failed to define it by turning it into good for people.” He called on regulators to “turn a theoretical law into a value proposition” through comprehensive enforcement: “Use the damn powers you now have — and help us to help you.”