The Perception Battlespace

NATO and the European Union both treat influence activity as a security issue, but they use different terms. NATO’s Allied Command Transformation writes about cognitive warfare, the contest over how people perceive and decide. The European External Action Service uses foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI, which it describes as a mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour that is manipulative in character and carried out in an intentional and coordinated way by state or state-linked actors.

The difference matters. FIMI is defined by observable behaviour, such as fake accounts and coordinated amplification, so it can be measured. Cognitive warfare is a broader concept, so claims made under that label need more careful checking.

In August 2023 Meta said it had removed 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Pages, 15 Groups and 15 Instagram accounts originating in China for coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and described the network as the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world. The activity ran across more than 50 platforms and forums, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X, and targeted Taiwan, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan and Chinese-speaking audiences.

Meta linked the activity to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement. It also reported that the operation struggled to reach beyond its own echo chamber, often receiving comments from its own accounts to create the look of popularity. The scale was real, and so was the limited reach.

On 4 September 2024 the US Department of Justice announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used in a Russian government-directed influence operation known as Doppelganger. The department alleged that three Russian firms, Social Design Agency, Structura National Technology and ANO Dialog, worked at the direction of the Russian Presidential Administration. Methods included paid influencers, paid social media advertisements, some of them made with artificial intelligence tools, and fake profiles posing as citizens of the targeted countries. The Treasury Department announced sanctions on ten individuals and two entities at the same time.

These are government allegations supported by court filings, and the defendants are in Russia. Even so, the case shows a documented chain from a named state office, through contractors, to specific domains and accounts.

The fourth EEAS report on FIMI threats, published in March 2026, recorded 540 incidents in 2025 across 19 platforms and about 43,000 pieces of content. It attributed 29 percent of incidents to Russia and 6 percent to China, and noted that Russian and Chinese infrastructure occasionally worked in parallel, mostly through opportunistic amplification of each other’s content. Those figures describe incidents detected and analysed under the EEAS’s own method, not the whole information environment.

Taken together, the cases show that influence operations are real, organised and sometimes very large. They do not show that any of them controls what a population perceives. The best-documented operations are notable for volume and cost, while evidence of persuasion is thin, and the strongest finding about Spamouflage is that it mostly talked to itself.