Germany is heading for an election on Feb. 23, and officials and disinformation experts have flagged several coordinated efforts to influence the vote through disinformation.

Vance mocked the notion that such campaigns could derail elections. “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

In his speech, Vance singled out Romania.

A first-round election in November resulted in a surprise victory for the far-right ultranationalist Călin Georgescu, in part thanks to a wildly successful TikTok campaign. The result was later annulled amid concerns over a Russian influence campaign.

“To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or God forbid vote a different way, or even worse, win an election,” Vance said.

Tech face-off, round 11

Vance’s Munich stop was just the latest case of the U.S. government pressuring the EU to tone down its enforcement of tech laws. In Paris on Tuesday, he insisted that Europe needs an approach that “fosters the creation of AI technology rather than strangles it.”