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The United States has imposed visa bans on five Europeans, including a former European Union commissioner, accusing them of pressuring technology companies to censor and suppress “American views they oppose.”
In a statement released Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the individuals “radical activists” who had “escalated the censorship crackdown” by foreign states against “American speakers and American businesses.”
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“For too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to force American platforms to punish American views to which they oppose,” he said on X.
“The Trump administration will no longer tolerate these blatant acts of extraterritorial censorship,” he added.
The most important target was Thierry Breton, who served as European Commissioner for the Internal Market from 2019 to 2024.
Sarah Rogers, Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, described the French businessman as the “brains” of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law intended to combat hate speech, misinformation and disinformation on online platforms.
Rogers also accused Breton of using DSA to threaten Elon Musk, owner of X and close ally of US President Donald Trump, ahead of an interview Musk conducted with Trump during last year’s presidential campaign.
‘Witch hunt’
Breton responded to the visa ban in an article on
“To our American friends: censorship is not where you think,” he added.
Others named by Rogers are: Imran Ahmed, executive director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German organization, and Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).
French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot “strongly” condemned the visa restrictions, saying the EU “cannot allow the rules governing its digital space to be imposed on them by others.” He stressed that the DSA was “democratically adopted in Europe” and that “it has absolutely no extraterritorial scope and does not affect the United States in any way.”
HateAid’s Ballon and von Holdenberg described the visa bans as an attempt to obstruct the enforcement of European law on U.S. companies operating in Europe.
“We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who defend human rights and freedom of expression,” they said in a statement.
A GDI spokesperson also called the U.S. action “immoral, illegal and un-American,” as well as “an authoritarian attack on free speech and a blatant act of government censorship.”
The punitive measures follow the Trump administration’s release of a national security strategy, which accused European leaders of censoring free speech and suppressing opposition to immigration policies that it said risked “wiping out civilization” from the continent.
The DSA in particular has emerged as a flashpoint in US-EU relations, with US conservatives denouncing it as a weapon of censorship against right-wing thought in Europe and beyond, a charge Brussels denies.
The legislation requires big platforms to explain content moderation decisions, provide transparency for users and grant researchers access to study questions such as children’s exposure to harmful content.
Tensions further escalated this month after the EU fined Musk’s X for violating the DSA’s rules on advertising transparency and its methods of ensuring users were verified, real people.
Washington signaled last week that key European companies – including Accenture, DHL, Mistral, Siemens and Spotify – could be targeted in response.
The United States also attacked Britain’s Online Safety Act, which imposes similar content moderation requirements on major social media platforms.
The White House last week suspended implementation of a technology cooperation agreement with the United Kingdom, saying it opposed the U.K.’s technology rules.
