By Nayara Güércio
.
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, or FIMI, can sound like a technical term. But at its core, it describes something very human: the attempt to influence what people believe, who they trust, and how they understand the world around them.
FIMI is not just false information. What makes it different is the element of foreign interference. These campaigns are usually connected to state actors, proxies, aligned media, private firms, coordinated networks, or other foreign-linked groups trying to shape public debate in another society. Their aim may be to confuse people, polarise communities, weaken trust in institutions, or influence democratic processes.
What makes FIMI so difficult to confront is that it often looks familiar. It can appear as a news article, a meme, a video, a social media post, a fake expert comment, or even a cloned version of a trusted website. It does not always invent new fears. Often, it takes existing concerns, frustrations, and tensions, then pushes them further.
The ATHENA materials show that FIMI is not limited to elections. It can target public health, education, military trust, international alliances, climate debates, and social cohesion. It can undermine support for Ukraine, impersonate credible media, pose as local journalism, or use AI-generated content to make manipulation faster and harder to detect.
This is why FIMI matters. Successful campaigns do not need everyone to believe every false claim. Sometimes, they only need to make people tired, suspicious, angry, or unsure of where to turn for reliable information. Once trust begins to break down, democracy becomes easier to manipulate.
Responding to FIMI means more than debunking false claims after they spread. Fact-checking matters, of course. So do platform transparency, investigations, regulation, content moderation, and better access to data for researchers. But resilience also depends on people: educators, journalists, students, communities, and citizens who can ask better questions about what they see online.
A useful starting point is simple: who benefits from this message? Who is being targeted? Which emotions are being activated? Which narratives are being repeated? And what is being done to make the content seem credible, popular, or urgent?
FIMI is strategic, adaptive, and often difficult to attribute. Technology can make it more powerful, especially through AI-generated images, synthetic voices, and manipulated videos. But technology can also support detection and verification. The challenge is to combine technical tools with human judgement, context, and ethical responsibility.
Above all, the response to FIMI must be collective. No single institution, platform, newsroom, classroom, or government can solve this alone. Defending democratic information spaces requires cooperation, transparency, education, and trust.
Because when people no longer know what to believe, democracy becomes easier to distort. And that is exactly what ATHENA is working to push back against.
Please check the ATHENA fact-sheet here:
Posted by: Nayara Güércio (Trilateral Research)