Foreign leaders are condemning the Trump administration for imposing visa restrictions on five Europeans whom Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused of trying to censor Americans under the European Union’s content moderation law.
Five people, including former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, whom U.S. officials labeled the “mastermind” behind the EU’s Digital Services Act regulating social media platforms, are now barred from entering the United States over what Rubio called “efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”
Breton likened the actions to a “witch hunt.”
“As a reminder: 90% of the European Parliament — our democratically elected body — and all 27 Member States unanimously voted the DSA,” Breton posted. “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’”
French President Emmanuel Macron said France will “stand firm against pressure and will protect Europeans.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered similar criticism.
“Freedom of speech is the foundation of our strong and vibrant European democracy,” she posted. “We are proud of it. We will protect it.”
The other Europeans hit with the travel restrictions on Tuesday were Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate; Clare Melford, leader of the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index; and Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of the German nonprofit organization HateAid.
Rubio assailed them as “radical activists” who “weaponized NGOs [with] have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states — in each case targeting American speakers and American companies.” He has also threatened to expand the travel restrictions to additional, unspecified Europeans.
X, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, was slapped with a more than $140 million fine earlier this month by the European Commission under its DSA moderation law.
“The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” Rubio added in a post to X. “We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
EU FINES X $140 MILLION, RISKING THE IRE OF TRUMP
Rubio recently offered his most explicit appeal yet for Europeans to combat what he called the “erasure” of their cultural inheritance, being threatened by mass migration, and that more foreign nationals could undermine the NATO military alliance.
“You go to these NATO meetings, what they will tell you is — ‘our shared history, our shared legacy, our shared values, our shared priorities.’ That’s what they talk about as the reason for this alliance,” Rubio told the Washington Examiner at a recent press conference. “Well, if you erase your shared history, your shared cultures, your shared ideology, your shared priorities, your shared principles — then you just have a straight-up defense agreement. That’s all you have.”