(The Hill) – The United States on Tuesday placed visa bans on five Europeans leading campaigns to combat misinformation and hate online, but whom the Trump administration has accused of censoring social media platforms.
The ban was placed on French former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed, Global Disinformation Index CEO Clare Melford and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon.
Of the five, Breton orchestrated the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which aims to make the internet safer by compelling online platforms to confront and disable hate speech and misinformation. The U.S. claims that the law unfairly targets American tech companies and citizens, Reuters reported.
In announcing the visa bans, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the five of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”
“The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” Rubio said in a post on the social platform X. “Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
Breton, Ahmed, Melford, Von Hodenberg and Ballon are banned under a May policy that places restrictions on visas for any foreign nationals who the administration claims are censoring Americans.
Breton slammed the ban, asking on X if “McCarthy’s witch hunt” was back.
“To our American friends: “Censorship isn’t where you think it is,” his post reads.
Former diplomat and Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) slammed the ban while also noting that the Center for Countering Digital Hate “flags content that is antisemitic or harmful to children.”
“Just to be clear — Marco Rubio is banning the leaders of an organization called the Center for Countering Digital Hate for the ‘crime’ of publishing a top-12 list of anti-vaxxers online,” Malinowski wrote on X.
French President Emmanuel Macron also condemned the ban, accusing the U.S. of “intimidation and coercion” that undermines European sovereignty.
“The European Union’s digital regulations were adopted following a democratic and sovereign process by the European Parliament and the Council,” Macron posted on X. “They apply within Europe to ensure fair competition among platforms, without targeting any third country, and to ensure that what is illegal offline is also illegal online. The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”
Macron vowed to work with the European Commission and other European leaders to “defend our digital sovereignty and our regulatory autonomy.”
