Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The U.S. State Department said it would deny visas to five people, including a former European commissioner, because they tried to “force” U.S. social media platforms to suppress their objections.
“These activists and weaponized NGOs have driven censorship crackdowns by foreign governments — each time targeting American speakers and American companies,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
Thierry Breton, the European Commission’s former top tech regulator, said it was a “witch hunt”.
Breton has been described by the U.S. State Department as the “mastermind” of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes content moderation on social media companies.
However, it angered some American conservatives who saw it as an attempt to censor right-wing views. Brussels denies this.
Breton clashed with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of Company X, over his obligation to abide by EU rules.
The European Commission was recently fined €120m (£105m) over its blue tick badge – First fine under DSA. It said the platform’s blue tick system was “deceptive” because the company did not “meaningfully verify users.”
In response, Musk’s website blocked the committee from creating ads on its platform.
In response to the visa ban, Breton posted on X: “To our American friends: censorship is not where you think it is.”
Clare Melford, leader of the UK’s Global Disinformation Index (GDI), also made the list.
US Deputy Secretary of State Sarah B Rogers accused GDI of using US taxpayer money to “encourage censorship and blacklisting of American speech and media.”
“The visa sanctions announced today are an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship,” a GDI spokesperson told the BBC.
“The Trump administration has once again used the full force of the federal government to intimidate, censor and silence voices with which they disagree. Their actions today are unethical, illegal and un-American.”
Imran Ahmed of the Center to Combat Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that fights online hate and misinformation, was also banned.
Rogers called Ahmed “a key collaborator in the Biden administration’s effort to weaponize government against American citizens.”
The BBC has contacted CCDH for comment.
Also banned were Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of HateAid, a group the State Department said helped enforce the DSA.
In a statement to the BBC, the two chief executives called it “an act of repression by a government that is increasingly ignoring the rule of law and seeking to silence critics by any means necessary”.
They added: “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and free speech.”
Rubio said steps have been taken to impose visa restrictions on “agents of the global censorship industrial complex so that they will generally be barred from entering the United States.”
“President Trump has made clear that his America First foreign policy rejects infringements on U.S. sovereignty. Overreach by foreign censors targeting U.S. speech is no exception,” he added.
