3rd EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats

The third EEAS FIMI report shifts the analytical focus toward infrastructure: rather than cataloguing individual incidents, it maps the digital infrastructure — domains, platforms, amplification networks — through which Russian and Chinese FIMI operations are conducted. This infrastructural lens is analytically significant; it allows attribution to persist across individual incidents and reveals the systematic, organised nature of state-sponsored FIMI as distinct from organic disinformation.

Published in March 2025 and covering the 2024 electoral cycle — one of the most intense election years in democratic history — the report documents FIMI activity across more than 70 elections. The finding that FIMI intensity correlates with electoral salience for adversary states is empirically important. The infrastructure mapping methodology introduced here has since been adopted by several EU member state intelligence services as a template for national FIMI analysis.