Europe’s Awakening to the FIMI Challenge: How the EU Can Counter Foreign Manipulation and Interference Threats

The 4th EEAS report on foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), published in March, marks another step on the EU’s path to conceptualize and respond to information threats. While Russia continues to dominate the landscape, the report’s sections on China signal growing institutional awareness that Beijing’s FIMI activities require distinct analytical attention and tailored response.

China’s Growing FIMI Footprint

The numbers tell a familiar but evolving story. In 2025, the European External Action Service (EEAS) alone detected 540 FIMI incidents globally, mobilizing over 10,500 social media channels and websites. Russia accounted for 29 percent of the attributable incidents, China for 6 percent, with the remaining 65 percent unattributed, but presenting indicators of coordination with Russian or Chinese infrastructure. These figures, however, possibly underestimate Beijing’s actual operational scope. As the report emphasizes, the vast majority of FIMI infrastructure – over 90 percent of mapped channels – operates covertly, designed to obscure its origins and complicate attribution.

What is more, China’s FIMI profile differs fundamentally from Russia’s. Where Moscow’s strategic objective leans toward distortion and division – reframing events and deepening societal fractures – Beijing primarily seeks to dismiss criticism and promote its own narratives. The EEAS’ analysis of China’s strategic objectives throughout 2025 confirms a dominant pattern of dismissive tactics: arguing that criticism of China is biased or ideologically motivated, while projecting an image of a peaceful, reliable, and technologically advanced global power. This aligns with our recent research on Chinese messaging in Europe, which increasingly focuses on contrasting a supposedly stagnant EU with a dynamic, future-oriented China.

AI and the China-Russia Convergence

Another important contribution of the report is a dedicated case study on China’s use of artificial intelligence in FIMI operations. The EEAS identifies three distinct ways Chinese actors leverage AI: facilitating content creation, concealing the origins of state-linked networks, and reinforcing information laundering infrastructure.

For example, the Spamouflage network, one of China’s most prominent FIMI operations, has begun deploying AI-assisted impersonation videos and synthetic cartoons perpetuating Chinese state messaging at scale. While engagement remains low, the sheer volume of material creates an impression of a widespread sentiment. These developments mirror a broader trend: across all threat actors, 27 percent of detected incidents in 2025 involved AI-related TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) – a 259 percent increase from the previous year. Clearly, AI has moved from experimental use to routine deployment, enabling both Russia and China to produce manipulative content and interfere in information spaces at unprecedented speed, scale, and cost.

The convergence between Chinese and Russian FIMI ecosystems seems to remain largely opportunistic rather than systematically coordinated. Nonetheless, the EEAS report notes that Chinese outlets provide platforms for Russian voices – particularly around events like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation 2025 summit and last year’s Victory Day celebrations. Such convergences, even if not centrally planned, create a cumulative effect that reinforces both actors’ narratives present in European information spaces and beyond.

Europe’s Awakening

Perhaps even more important than the EEAS report itself is the fact that the EU and several of its member states are now moving beyond diagnosis and toward concrete institutional and political responses to FIMI.

Germany, the 4th most-targeted country in 2025 with 71 recorded FIMI incidents, experienced a particularly bruising confrontation with Russian operations around its February 2025 federal election. Soon thereafter, as part of the “Zeitenwende 2.0,” Berlin established a National Security Council, summoned the Russian ambassador over confirmed election interference, and included explicit FIMI-tackling provisions in its coalition agreement. The German government declared that the deliberate dissemination of false factual claims falls outside the protection of free expression – a significant normative shift for a country traditionally liberal on these issues.

Poland, targeted during its presidential election in 2025, activated the National Research Institute (NASK) as a frontline counter-FIMI body. NASK’s Disinformation Analysis Center monitored thousands of domains and accounts, reported over 46,000 cases of disinformation to social media platforms, and flagged potentially foreign-funded political advertisements to relevant state institutions. Importantly, NASK also employs dedicated Chinese-language analytical capacity, reflecting its understanding that the FIMI threat extends beyond Russia.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron articulated what could be Europe’s defining position on information threats. Speaking in New Delhi in February this year, he argued that defending “free speech” without algorithmic transparency is meaningless – or “bullshit,” in his blunt phrasing. He said it amounts to nothing if nobody understands how users are guided through content by opaque algorithms. This framing rightly reorients the debate away from a false binary of “censorship versus freedom of speech” and toward a more fundamental question: how the infrastructure underpinning public discourse is controlled – and who ultimately sets its terms.

Beyond Defense and Legal Constraints

These developments are long overdue, but welcome. The EU and its member states appear to be waking up from what could be characterized as an overly liberal and somewhat naive approach to the information domain – one rooted in the assumption that information environments are inherently self-correcting and that education is an all-encompasing answer to growing disinformation threats and societal polarization. The past decade suggests otherwise.

But a purely defensive posture remains insufficient. As the EEAS report itself acknowledges, influence campaigns succeed not because individual claims go unchallenged in a given moment, but because they fill narrative vacuums over longer periods of time. Chinese messaging gains traction in Europe not only because of its sophistication, but because it often occupies discursive spaces that European actors have left empty – particularly around technological progress, economic dynamism, and visions of the future.

The EU is, by design, a colossal bureaucratic machine in which virtually all actions are inherently regulatory. And it is precisely this legal structure that makes any institutional responses to FIMI so difficult. Efforts in this domain quickly run up against structural constraints, especially in today’s era of internal fragmentation and competing national priorities. Questions of competence, subsidiarity, and fairness of market access – they all raise disputes among the EU and its member states over who has the authority to act and on what basis. Legal codification, while necessary for durability and coherence, is therefore inherently contested.

And yet, there is one domain in which the EU does not have to face these constraints: its own strategic communication and narrative-building. No external or internal actor can claim that space unless it is willingly abandoned – as it has been in the past. This is a rare structural advantage. The EU does not need to negotiate regulatory authority to articulate its own story – it already possesses the institutional capacity and legitimacy to do so.

The paradox, then, is perhaps not one of capability but of choice? The tools exist, the foundations are laid, and the awareness is growing. It seems that the only actor standing between the EU and a genuinely pro-active approach toward shaping its own information environment is the EU itself. Neither Beijing nor Moscow can prevent it from competing on platforms where narratives are shaped, or projecting a confident vision of its future. What they may be counting on is that the EU will choose not to do so – paralyzed by internal divisions, bureaucratic lethargy, or the fear of upsetting the member states’ governments. But if the EU can – seemingly against all odds – summon the necessary creativity to develop its own stories, the courage to act, and the determination to sustain that effort, it can move beyond defending the information space to actively shaping it – a shift Europe can no longer afford to delay.