A New Era for the Global Information Sphere: Fostering information integrity or drilling information voids?
Naja Bentzen sets out how the second Trump administration is reshaping the global information sphere, from media to science and the challenges this represents for liberal democracy. This text is part of a forthcoming e-book by the Global Governance Research Group of the UNA Europa network, entitled ‘The European Union in an Illiberal World’.
Following World War II (WWII), the United States (US) positioned itself as a global beacon of democracy. This involved leading efforts to advance democratic values across the world, including a sustained push to support and uphold media freedom worldwide. During the Cold War, in particular, the US invested heavily in strategic communications and international media to bolster its global democratic ambitions and promote liberal democracy as a system abroad. The evolution of the European Union was interlinked with the United States and its growing soft power, underpinned by its hard power. The deep and close transatlantic relations – rooted in the shared values of democracy, peace, rule of law and economic development – served as an anchor for the post-WWII international order.
At the same time, US investment in scientific research enabled technological innovation to thrive. The US tech industry evolved to form the backbone of the current global information infrastructure, with US innovation enabling the creation of the commercial internet. US tech companies have facilitated – and impacted – public debates across the world in recent decades. US news media, academic research, and popular culture have helped the US drive global conversations. Today, the US space industry is leading the global satellite broadband market, and US tech companies are scrambling to win the geostrategic artificial Intelligence (AI) competition, including in the generative AI (GenAI) sector, with large language models (LLMs) rolled out across the world.
As a 2021 report by the US Congressional Research Service explained, informational instruments are an integral part of a country's "grand strategy" toolbox, alongside the diplomatic, military and economic tools it has at its disposal (O'Rourke 2021). Profound changes in the trajectory of US informational power, however, will not only affect this strategy. Due to its international informational influence, it will also have transformational consequences for the global information sphere and for democracy as a system.
"Drill, baby, drill": from information integrity to information voids
Experts have long sounded the alarm about the consequences of "truth decay" (Kavanagh and Rich 2018), including: the erosion of civil discourse; political paralysis; alienation and disengagement; as well as uncertainty. Whereas decay, however, describes an organic process, recent decisions in Washington DC by the Trump administration could signify a more deliberate development, in line with the "tech coup" Schaake cautioned about in 2024.
Conspiracy theories have been elevated to official executive narratives: most notably, the denial of the 2020 election result is building the core of the grand narrative of the second Trump administration. This calls into question the epistemic integrity of democracy (Lewandowsky et al, 2023), posing significant challenges to the cohesion of US society as well as to ties with traditional allies abroad. The "big lie" is also the basis for an evolving crackdown on evidence: academic experts, government officials and media who have documented and/or disproven the claims about a stolen election or publicized the facts are being targeted, often accused of "censoring" Americans in violation of the First Amendment (Arceneaux & Truex 2023).
Against this backdrop, the second Trump administration appears to be increasing its pressure on and control over key parts of the US information environment. The latter is a complex network of components, each interacting with various audiences, and is interconnected with global information ecosystems, affecting the world and the EU in various ways. Related decisions, including the termination of the intelligence team that produced and published long-term forecasts of global trends,[1] will create or increase knowledge vacuums or information voids.
Undermining scientific research, data and expertise
US investments in research and science have yielded high-quality scientific data used not only domestically, but also for the benefit of the rest of the world – including via the multilateral system – to identify global solutions to shared problems, for example, on global health challenges and climate change.
The second Trump administration has moved fast to cut funding for scientific research, firing thousands of scientists, removing websites that gave public access to scientific data, and putting pressure on researchers to delete mentions of unwanted issues like "climate change", "diversity" and "gender." The Trump administration’s clampdown on language that appears to carry (perceived) connotations of a liberal worldview prompted over 1,900 renowned scientists and members of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to sign an open letter calling on the administration to "cease its wholesale assault on US science."[2]
Between 28 February and 8 April 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated 694 grants focused on topics that were deemed not aligned with agency priorities (Liu, Kadaki, Patel, Krumholz 2025). The list includes 33 research grants for projects on vaccine hesitancy, or strategies to encourage vaccine uptake. In August 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has long spread and monetized debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines, announced that the US Department of Health and Human Services would cancel $500 million (€427 million) in funding for developing mRNA vaccines against viruses that cause diseases such as the flu and Covid-19. He used the scientifically invalidated argument that "mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses". Elevating vaccine skepticism to the official US narrative could further undermine trust in vaccines and in public health institutions, with potential repercussions far beyond the US. Officially promoting anti-science narratives confirms not only the false claims, but also lends credibility to conspiracy theory networks such as QAnon, which has exported conspiracy theories, including about vaccines, to the rest of the world.[3] RFK Jr.'s pressure on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) culminated in August 2025, when he replaced CDC director Susan Monarez over her resistance to dismissing high-level agency officials or to accept all his recommendations from a vaccine advisory panel he had reconstituted to include members who had questioned vaccine safety.
Another example of pressure on US science that affects large populations in and beyond the US occurred with the February 27, 2025, decision to terminate staff at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of the world’s leading centers for climate science. This action was in line with policy recommendations for the second Trump administration by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, which has received donations from the fossil fuel industries. In its Project 2025, the think tank portrayed the NOAA as "one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, [...] harmful to future U.S. prosperity" (Heritage Foundation 2024). NOAA is a central actor in the global ocean observation system for climate change and plays a key role in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), where it operates several WMO-recognized centers worldwide, providing forecasts and mission support to domestic and international customers.
By cutting research programs of key global importance and politicizing science, the Trump administration is preparing the ground for deeper, more fundamental voids in the information ecosystems.
News media: From promoting to demoting media freedom
The traditional US role in promoting media and internet freedom has been an important pillar of its soft power. The US has invested in international broadcasting via its Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which produced news and programming for over 3,000 radio and TV stations worldwide. Moreover, US corporate news media and broadcasters enjoy high global popularity and influence: CNN International news services, for example, reach over 475 million households worldwide.[4]
During his first term, Donald Trump's ties with the US media grew increasingly strained. As he pushed narratives that violated the norms of truth-telling, he frequently attacked media outlets and journalists with whom he did not agree as "fake news media." Since his re-election in 2024, Trump has increased the political and legal pressure on US media, in line with pre-election lawsuits and threats to "straighten out the press" during his second term (Enrich 2025). A number of important media outlets with significant global reach appear to have taken a more cautious approach. In December 2024, Reporters Without Borders warned that this could contribute to "an environment where Trump's campaign of intimidation successfully prompts self-censorship by media outlets who prefer to stay out of his crosshairs" (RSF 2024).
Following the 20 January executive order to end all aid "not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President", Trump's March 14, 2025, executive order to end all "unnecessary" federal programs included eliminating all USAGM operations "to the maximum extent". In line with this, USAGM is now proceeding with an "orderly shutdown" (USAGM 2025). Similarly, the Trump administration has frozen funding to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Both bodies have provided or facilitated significant support for journalism and media programs across the world. USAGM has been an important soft power tool, in particular during the Cold War: its sub-agencies including Voice of America (VOA, founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL, set up in 1950 to counter Soviet propaganda. In 2024, VoA and RFE/RL reached over 427 million people every week, including over 33% of Ukrainian adults, nearly 45% of Armenians, and about 25% of Serbians. In Latin America, VOA's Spanish-language service reached 100 million people.
Following Donald Trump's second inauguration, USAGM opened human resources investigations into VoA over perceived criticism of Trump. In March 2025, the White House cancelled VoA contracts with established international news services (the Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse) that it had used to complement its reporting. The move came amid growing tension between the White House and major news media, with AP suing the White House over barring its journalists from press pools, because AP continued to use the original name for the Gulf of Mexico – taking its international audiences into account – despite Trump's executive order to rename it "Gulf of America". On 7 May 2025, VoA President Kari Lake announced a "new partnership" with One America News Network (OAN), a pro-Trump TV channel that has a history of spreading disproven election denialism, "to provide newsfeed services to USAGM networks".
At the same time, the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has also disrupted Freedom House, one of the world's most influential human rights, democracy and media freedom watchdogs, founded by Eleanore Roosevelt in 1941. Freedom House has provided a compass for the state of democracy as well as media and internet freedom across the world. Its annual "Freedom of the Net" report has been used by tech companies to make decisions on whether or not to sell their products to authoritarian regimes, and has also informed democratic governments' cyber strategies.
In addition to the direct repercussions for media freedom, journalism and civil society across the world, the deletion of related US government websites will decrease global visibility of information about democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and the role of civil society online.
Corporate diplomacy or brinkmanship? Tech industry talking points
During his first term, Trump attempted to use the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to control social media companies, allowing the FCC to determine whether editorial decisions were taken in "good faith". Trump's executive order 13925 or May 28, 2020 , alleging that social media platforms were "engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse", came two days after Twitter for the first time added a fact-check label to a Trump Tweet which claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots were "fraudulent."
On the day of his second inauguration, Donald Trump's executive order "Restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” claimed that the federal government "under the guise of combatting 'misinformation,' 'disinformation,' and 'malinformation' [...] infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens," adding that "Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society." Former UN rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called the message a "warning to civil servants who work on combating online disinformation" (Oremus 2025). The executive order also marks a culmination of the mounting legal and political pressure on researchers and academics who have analyzed, documented and countered disinformation in the past years, including disproven claims about the 2020 election being "stolen" from Trump.
Two weeks earlier, just after the certification of the election, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaned into the new political culture. Following Elon Musk's lead, Zuckerberg announced that he would end Meta's third-party fact-checking program in the US, and instead move to a community notes program similar to that used by X. Singling out the EU's "ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship", Zuckerberg vowed to "work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world." J.D. Vance then repeated a similar message in Munich in February 2025, when he claimed that "EU Commission commissars" would "shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they've judged to be 'hateful content'." By building on the notion of "censorship" in Munich, Vance effectively exported domestic US fault lines to Europe.
US corporations are heavily represented among what the European Commission has designated very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large search engines (VLOSEs), which reach over 45 million users in the EU (is this all???), with a corresponding impact on public debate. Many of these companies are now competing intensely in the scramble to lead the LLM market, including by deploying their own AI chatbots globally.
Illustrating the risks to liberal democracy, concern about the poisoning of data by AI chatbots, or ideologically, politically or financially motivated tweaks of their outputs has been further fueled by incidents such as Grok's unverified claims about an alleged "white genocide" in South Africa; a narrative promoted by Musk and taken so seriously by Donald Trump that he based his decision to grant Afrikaners refugee status in the US on this claim (Chothia 2025). Perhaps less visibly, Grok has also integrated authoritarian state talking points as arguments for the decision to freeze funds to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Responding to the account "DOGEMemery", which claimed to have found "red flags of corruption or concerns" with NED via Grok, Musk tweeted "NED is a SCAM" on 2 February 2025, later adding that the "evil organization needs to be dissolved". "DOGEMemery"'s Grok-generated unreferenced list of "red flags" included official Beijing or Kremlin narratives (China Daily 2024) [5].
Recent signs that US corporations and the White House stand together in fighting EU regulation illustrate a widening gulf between a more pronounced version of what Anu Bradford calls the US market-driven approach to tech regulation on the one hand, and the EU's rights-driven approach on the other hand.
Who speaks for the US?
Traditionally, the US Department of State (DoS) has helped balance interests and values in its executive diplomacy. On the tech front, DoS had helped "internationalize and institutionalize our vision of 'tech for good'", as former Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said in 2024. With the decision by Trump's DoS, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to not only depart from efforts to counter Russian disinformation campaigns (by terminating relevant services and blacklisting related words), but also to target EU digital regulation as "censorship", corporate diplomacy seems to have eclipsed executive diplomacy.
The May 2025 DoS decision to launch an information campaign against the EU's digital regulation – alleging that the Digital Services Act (DSA) constitutes "censorship" – echoes existing talking points by the tech industry (Michaels, Gordon and Mackrael 2025). On May 28, Rubio announced a new visa restriction policy for "foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States", arguing that it is "unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship", warning that "We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty, especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech."
Within less than five months, the escalating rhetoric about EU digital regulation has thus been translated into corporate action, DoS strategic communications, and executive action.
Impact on and role of the EU
The 2024 elections in the EU and in the US, respectively, paved the way for diverging paths of the two traditional allies in upholding democracy and its associated information sphere. EU efforts to counter information manipulation include components of the planned European Democracy Shield, which Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in July 2024.
The EU has spearheaded efforts to protect citizens in the information sphere via its regulatory framework, with the DSA at the core. The Code of Conduct on Disinformation under the DSA requires VLOPs and VLOSEs to work with researchers and fact-checkers to mitigate risks from online disinformation. The framework also includes the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the Artificial Intelligence Act, the European Media Freedom Act and the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). The European Parliament's special committee on the European Democracy Shield (EUDS), created in February 2025, will propose further measures in its forthcoming report.
Meanwhile, the EU is already acting to counter the repercussions of the new US trajectory. Steps include €5.5 million in emergency funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as announced by High Representative/Vice President Kaja Kallas in May 2025. Another EU action includes the April 2025 launch of a €5 million call to strengthen the European Fact-Checking Network. Addressing a different aspect of the pressure on scientific facts, Commission President von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a "Choose Europe for Science" program in May 2025, amid an emerging brain drain from the US, which has sparked a hiring competition between China and the EU.
Conclusion
With the US aligning itself with authoritarian actors – both in words and in deeds – in the information space, the EU is under pressure to boost its collective cognitive resilience and foster information integrity at home and beyond its borders, in line with the aim of the United Nations' (UN) global principles for information integrity. Unless the EU and other democratic actors step up, the strategic information vacuums that the Trump administration is creating will be filled by China and Russia, which have invested heavily in global information tools and whose influence is rising strongly. Furthermore, previous US efforts to boost information integrity, including via multilateral diplomacy in the UN and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) seem unlikely to continue.
At a time when the Trump administration is "flooding the zone" and encouraging short-termism, long-term strategic planning will be key for the EU, not only to defend and protect its own democracy, but also to help support democracy in the US, now and in the future. As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural speech, "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger." However, the meaning of freedom – and not least freedom of speech – is facing fundamental challenges. By extension, the meaning of the shared values of the transatlantic alliance is under contention.
The "wholesale re-envisioning of what European leadership will look like in the 21st century," as Gasparov and Landsbergis (2025) have suggested, must take this new reality into account. Although the "Brussels effect" (Bradford 2019) may not outweigh the "billionaire effect" in the short term, the values-based, human-centric EU approach that aims to put safeguards in place to protect citizens and democracy in the digital realm could garner greater public and diplomatic trust in the long term than superimposing corporate interests on geopolitics (Bentzen 2025). This will, however, not happen organically; significant strategic investment in all components of the global information sphere will be key pieces in the continent's democratic resilience jigsaw puzzle.
Naja Bentzen is a policy analyst in the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), covering aspects of information manipulation, information integrity and transatlantic relations in the Digital Policies Unit of the Members' Research Service. The opinions expressed here are her own, and do not necessarily represent the EPRS. Previously, worked in the European Parliament Liaison Office in Washington DC between 2020-2024, with a focus on democracy and disinformation. While in Washington, she was also a fellow at the German Marshall Fund US and at George Mason University. Prior to joining the European Parliament, Naja worked as an open-source analyst in Vienna, Austria. Naja Bentzen has also worked as a journalist (based in Vienna) for Scandinavia's leading weekly, Weekendavisen, covering Central and south-eastern Europe.
Image: David Yu
[1] Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Fact Sheet: ODNI 2.0 launch. 20 August 2025.
[2] Public Statement on Supporting Science for the Benefit of All Citizens, 31 March 2025. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/top-u-s-researchers-warn-against-climate-of-fear-threatening-science/
[3] QAnon provides an umbrella narrative for a wide spectrum of sub-conspiracy theories, alleging that a "deep-state" network run by global elites is trying to undermine President Trump.
[4] According to WBD press, accessed on 9 June 2025. https://press.wbd.com/in/brands/cnn-international-4
[5] For example: "Undesirable NGO Status: Russia labelled NED as an 'undesirable' organization in 2015, highlighting concerns over foreign interference in domestic affairs."
References
Arceneaux, Kevin and Truex, Rory. 2023. Donald Trump and the Lie. Cambridge University Press. 2023. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A438DF5A45FE78CB2BC887859EFAB587/S1537592722000901a.pdf/donald-trump-and-the-lie.pdf
Bentzen, Naja. 2025. "Restoring trust within the public sphere". "Ten issues to watch in 2025", European Parliamentary Research Service. January 2025.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2025/767186/EPRS_IDA(2025)767186_EN.pdf
Boot, Max. 2025. While Musk dismantles a pro-democracy group, America's enemies cheer. The Washington Post. 19 February 2025.
Bradford, Anu. 2019. The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World. Oxford University Press 2019.
China Daily. 2024. The National Endowment for Democracy: What It Is and What It Does. mfa.gov.cn. August 2024. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202408/09/WS66b598b5a3104e74fddb9407.html
Csernatoni, Raluca. 2024. "Charting the Geopolitics and European Governance of Artificial Intelligence". Carnegie Europe. 6 March 2024.
Enrich, David. 2025. Trump's New Line of Attack Against the Media Gains Momentum. New York Times. 7 February 2025.
Feldstein, Steven. 2021. The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology Is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021.
Feng, Shangbin; Park, Chan Young; Liu, Yuhan; Tsvetkov, Yulia. 2023. From Pretraining Data to Language Models to Downstream Tasks: Tracking the Trails of Political Biases Leading to Unfair NLP Models. Association for Computational Linguistics. July 2023. https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.656.pdf
Foreign Affairs Council and Foreign Affairs Council (Defence), main results. 20 May 2025. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/fac/2025/05/20/
Heritage Foundation. 2024. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. 2024.
Kavanagh, Jennifer and Rich, Michael D. (2018). Truth Decay. Rand Corporation. 2018. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U.K.H., Cook, J., van der Linden, S., Roozenbeek, J., Oreskes, N. 2023. Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 54. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101711
Liu M, Kadakia KT, Patel VR, Krumholz HM. 2025. Characterization of Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health. JAMA. 8 May 2025. doi:10.1001/jama.2025.7707
Meta. 2025. The Llama 4 herd: The beginning of a new era of natively multimodal AI innovation. AIMeta Blog. 5 April 2025.
Michaels, D., Gordon, M. and Mackrael, K. 2025. Trump Administration Targets Europe's Digital Laws as a Threat to Basic Rights and U.S. Business. The Wall Street Journal. 15 May 2025. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-administration-targets-europes-digital-laws-as-a-threat-to-basic-rights-and-u-s-business-20db1016
Musk, Elon. 2025. NED is a SCAM. X. 2 February 2025. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886093812352565741
O'Rourke, Ronald. 2021. U.S. Role in the World: Background and Issues for Congress. Congressional Research Service. 2021. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R44891
Oremus, Will. 2025. Trump's anti-censorship order has a blind spot. The Washington Post. 22 January 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/22/trump-eo-online-censorship-analysis/
Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF). 2024. USA: Trump's vengeful lawsuits against media lack legal basis, but harm American press freedom. 23 December 2024. https://rsf.org/en/usa-trump-s-vengeful-lawsuits-against-media-lack-legal-basis-harm-american-press-freedom
Schaake, Marietje. 2024. The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. Princeton University Press. 2024.
United States Agency for Global Media. 2025. USAGM networks reached record global audience in FY 2024. USAGM. 17 January 2025.
United States Agency for Global Media. 2025. FY 2026 Congressional Budget Justification.
July 2025.
