The State Department said that five well-known European officials and activists are not allowed to enter the United States because they are accused of working together to pressure American tech companies to censor U.S. citizens’ speech online.
Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, said that this is the first time the new visa policy, which was announced in May, has been enforced.
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The policy is meant to keep foreign nationals from “directly advancing or facilitating censorship of protected speech within the United States.”
Rubio wrote on X, “For far too long, ideologues in Europe have worked together to force American platforms to punish American views they don’t like.”
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“The Trump Administration will no longer put up with these terrible acts of censorship outside of the United States,” Rubio wrote.
Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, the co-CEOs of the German organization HateAid, Clare Melford, the executive director of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), and Thierry Breton, a former European Union commissioner who was in charge of putting the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) into action, are the five people named in the action.
Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers said in a post that the banned people were part of a group that pushed “foreign government censorship campaigns against American citizens and U.S. companies.”
Rogers wrote, “These foreign operatives have tried to use the excuse of fighting ‘hate’ or ‘disinformation’ to get global tech platforms to silence American speech, including political speech.”
Rogers called Breton, a French businessman and former finance minister, the “mastermind” behind the EU’s Digital Services Act.
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This law says that big online platforms must watch and remove content that is illegal or harmful in Europe.
She said that the law had been “weaponized” to put pressure on American companies like X (formerly Twitter) and Meta to remove or lower the ranking of content that opposed the government or had conservative views.
Last year, Breton became a key player in the fight between the EU and American social media platforms when he told billionaire Elon Musk that his platform could be fined under the DSA for airing a live interview with Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.
Breton wrote on X in response to the ban, “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’” He said that all 27 EU member states had voted to adopt the DSA in 2022. He said that the law was meant to “make sure that what is illegal offline is also illegal online.”
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Jean-Noël Barrot, the French Foreign Minister, called the visa restrictions “an unacceptable act of political retaliation.”
He said that France “strongly condemns this decision” and that the DSA “has absolutely no extraterritorial reach and in no way concerns the United States.”
Ballon and von Hodenberg of HateAid said in a joint statement that the Trump administration was “repressing” people and that the ban was meant to “silence critics by any means necessary.”
The Global Disinformation Index and the Center for Countering Digital Hate have been criticized in the U.S. for working with American tech companies and advertisers to flag or demonetize conservative media outlets.
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According to officials, the visa bans were put in place under Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
This section gives the president the power to deny entry to people whose presence could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States.
The visa bans are the most recent move by the Trump administration to stop foreign interference in U.S. speech.
This is part of a larger effort to keep American free speech separate from what the administration calls “foreign information control regimes.”
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
