By Nayara Güércio
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As part of the ATHENA project’s research into Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), we spoke with journalists from Ukraine, Finland, Romania, and Ireland. Their countries are different, their media landscapes are different, and the pressures they face are different. Still, across the conversations, one message came through very clearly: disinformation is not just something journalists report on. It is something they now have to work against every day.
For some, the threat is immediate and tied to war, sovereignty, and national survival. For others, it appears through elections, anti-migrant narratives, conspiracy theories, violent protests, or growing hostility towards public institutions. But the pattern is familiar. Disinformation enters public conversation, attaches itself to existing fears, and starts pulling people further apart.
What made these interviews especially powerful was that the journalists were not speaking about disinformation as an abstract concept. They were speaking from newsrooms, public debates, crisis moments, and national contexts where false narratives have already had visible consequences. They described a media environment where information can be manipulated quickly, emotionally, and at scale, often before journalists have time to verify, contextualise, and respond.
One of the strongest ideas to emerge was that disinformation does not always need people to believe a lie completely. Sometimes, it only needs to make them doubt everything else. One journalist described this as a “doubt strategy”. The point is not only to spread falsehoods. It is to weaken trust in journalism, institutions, experts, democratic processes, and even the possibility of shared facts.
Social media platforms sit at the centre of this problem. Telegram, Facebook, and X/Twitter were repeatedly mentioned as spaces where narratives travel fast, often pushed by algorithms that reward outrage and emotional reaction. In Ukraine, Telegram was described as particularly important, with more than half the population using it for news. That makes it both a vital information channel and a major vulnerability.
Artificial Intelligence added another layer of concern. Journalists spoke about synthetic voices, AI-generated videos, fabricated images, and fake news content becoming harder to detect and easier to circulate. At the same time, they recognised that AI could also become part of the response, helping journalists and researchers identify patterns, verify content, and track manipulation more effectively. The question is not simply whether AI is good or bad. The question is who uses it, for what purpose, and with what safeguards.
Again and again, the conversations returned to education. Not in a vague, distant sense, but as one of the most practical forms of democratic resilience. Media literacy, digital literacy, critical thinking, and historical awareness were described as essential. One journalist from Finland made a particularly important point: knowing the history of your own country can make people harder to manipulate. That matters because many disinformation campaigns work by twisting memory, reopening old wounds, or turning social anxieties into political weapons.
The interviews also showed how difficult it is to draw a clean line between foreign and domestic manipulation. In Romania, disinformation was linked to electoral disruption. In Ireland, journalists connected online narratives to offline violence, including riots, arson, and assaults. In these cases, information manipulation does not stay on a screen. It moves into streets, communities, and political life.
There were also important differences in how journalists understood responsibility. Some called for stronger regulation of platforms and better enforcement of the Digital Services Act. Others were cautious about state control and worried about overreach. But there was strong agreement that journalists cannot be left to carry this burden alone. Governments, educators, researchers, civil society, technology companies, and the public all have a role to play.
For ATHENA, these interviews reinforce a central lesson: countering FIMI is not only about detecting false content. It is about understanding how manipulation travels through emotion, memory, identity, and trust. It is about supporting journalists who are on the front line of verification. It is about building tools that are useful, ethical, and sensitive to national contexts.
Above all, they all came back to the same point: we need to restore trust. Because when people no longer know what to believe, democracy becomes much easier to manipulate. And that is exactly what we are trying to push back against.
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Posted by: Nayara Güércio (Trilateral Research)