Coordinated disinformation campaign targeted fact-checkers during GlobalFact 2026 conference

Narrative intelligence company Repsense has identified a coordinated disinformation campaign on Facebook targeting fact-checkers during the GlobalFact 2026 conference in Vilnius, LRT reports.

According to the company, the campaign was detected within 24 hours, involving 13 authors, 8 Facebook groups, 19 posts, and 76 related mentions. Repsense CEO Mykolas Katkus stated that the operation displayed clear role distribution—initiators, intermediaries, and distributors—with coordination patterns previously observed in other disinformation investigations.

“This time, the attack remained within an alternative information bubble and had no major impact. But the model is repeatable: only the topic and target change. Tomorrow, the same mechanism could be directed at a company, institution, or elections—so it’s important to recognize it early,” Katkus said.

The campaign began on June 18 with a post misrepresenting publicly available funding data of fact-checking organizations as evidence of foreign control. The message later spread to an alternative news portal, followed by radical comments from other authors. A second wave emerged that evening when a user posted identical text across eight Facebook groups, accounting for about 37% of all mentions in the analyzed data cluster.

Repsense noted similar narratives had previously been observed in Armenia, where coordinated campaigns targeted fact-checkers, independent media, and civil society organizations.

GlobalFact is the world’s largest annual conference for professional fact-checkers, organized by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) in partnership with local hosts. This year’s event in Vilnius was co-organized by IFCN, Delfi, LRT, and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network.