Μake us preferred on Google In the days leading up to Moldova’s September 2025 parliamentary elections, voters faced more than competing political promises. Social media became a channel for coordinated disinformation attacks, including misleading AI-generated videos and networks of automated accounts. For a citizen scrolling through their morning feed, distinguishing a genuine political controversy from a fabricated one could be increasingly difficult. Even when false content is eventually exposed, the suspicion it creates tends to linger. Its objective may not be to convince voters of one particular claim, but simply to flood the information space with doubt. The problem, consequently, is not that technology has complicated communication, but that it can be exploited to undermine democratic decision-making. Europe must address foreign information manipulation as a security challenge and develop a response that ensures protection, rather than restriction of democratic freedoms.
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, as the European External Action Service examines it, goes beyond the circulation of individual false claims. It involves deliberate and coordinated behavior designed to manipulate the information space and potentially undermine democratic processes. Such operations can consist of misleading news websites, impersonated media outlets, fake social media profiles and content distributed across multiple platforms. Their purpose is not necessarily to make every citizen believe the same story. Instead, they seek to discredit political leaders, deepen existing social divisions, weaken trust in public institutions, or cast doubt on democratic and European integration processes overall. The Service’s 2026 report describes the digital infrastructure behind these activities, highlighting how seemingly separate accounts and websites can form interconnected networks. It also proposes a Deterrence Playbook that targets the intermediaries and infrastructure behind these operations, not just individual posts. Identifying who amplifies a narrative, how networks interact and whose interests they serve is therefore essential to understanding the security implications of information manipulation.
Arguably, social media platforms make information manipulation particularly easy and attractive because they combine low or virtually zero production costs with extraordinary speed and reach. A single fabricated video can be reproduced, translated and shared across platforms before journalists or fact-checkers are able to verify it. AI tools further lower the barriers to producing and circulating convincing images, audio and text at scale. Meanwhile, engagement-driven recommendation systems can increase the visibility of emotionally charged content, while automated accounts may create the misleading impression that a claim enjoys widespread public support. The result is a gap between how quickly manipulation spreads and how long it takes to establish the facts. Yet technology alone does not explain the problem. Users may also share this type of content because it confirms existing beliefs, expresses genuine fears, or reinforces group identities. Thus, an effective approach must address both the digital infrastructure that enables manipulation and the social conditions that make it persuasive.
The European Union has begun to address these risks through a combination of regulation, monitoring and cooperation. The Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks, including those affecting electoral processes and fundamental rights. Meanwhile, the Service monitors foreign information manipulation and supports cooperation with international partners. In November 2025, the European Commission also presented the European Democracy Shield, outlining further measures to strengthen democratic stability, including a European Centre for Democratic Resilience and an incident and crisis protocol under the DSA. Still, these initiatives do not always guarantee an efficient response. Moldova shows the gap. As a candidate country with a small market, its authorities reported having little leverage over the platforms, and observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported that most of about 1,000 takedown requests went unanswered. This raised a practical question and potential weakness: whether authorities can coordinate quickly enough to respond before organized operations spread. As a result, the EU needs not only to reinforce existing rules, but also to speed up cooperation among platforms, independent researchers and national authorities. Success should be measured by whether these operations lose reach and become costlier to run, not by how many posts are removed.
However, any efforts to combat disinformation raise a legitimate concern about who decides what counts as false or manipulative information. If this concern goes unaddressed, it may create additional problems for freedom of speech. To illustrate, national governments may use this ambiguity to label criticism or arguments from opposing parties as a security threat, while platforms may remove lawful content without thorough review in order to avoid regulatory penalties. Such risks are especially high during elections, when controversial opinions and challenges to those in power are part of democratic debate. Not every anti-EU argument, for instance, is foreign propaganda, and not every misleading statement constitutes a coordinated interference operation. For that reason, the answer lies not in unrestricted censorship, but in transparent procedures, independent oversight, meaningful appeals and overall proportionate measures that recognize and distinguish actual propaganda from different or opposing political viewpoints.
To conclude, Europe’s digital front line cannot be secured through content removal alone. A holistic approach that protects democracy, and particularly freedom of speech, requires identifying coordinated manipulation early, exposing the networks that sustain it and giving citizens the tools they need to evaluate the content they encounter. The EU could establish a preventive, election-focused coordination mechanism activated months before scheduled elections, bringing together national electoral authorities, major platforms and independent researchers, with transparent reporting and safeguards for freedom of expression. Drawing on the Deterrence Playbook, such cooperation would help identify vulnerable infrastructure and potential intermediaries before they can distort public discourse, without giving governments unchecked power over political speech. Ultimately, democratic security is not about ensuring that citizens reach the “right” conclusions. It is about ensuring their ability to reach their own conclusions without covert manipulation.
Nektaria Zacharou is an undergraduate student in International and European Studies at the University of Macedonia. She is a member of SAFIA and a writer for ODETH.
