The US State Department stated it could deny visas to 5 individuals, together with a former EU commissioner, for in search of to “coerce” American social media platforms into suppressing viewpoints they oppose.
“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states – in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in a press release.
Thierry Breton, the previous prime tech regulator on the European Commission, recommended {that a} “witch hunt” was happening.
Breton was described by the State Department because the “mastermind” of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes content material moderation on social media firms.
However, it has angered some US conservatives who see it as in search of to censor right-wing opinions. Brussels denies this.
Breton has clashed with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and proprietor of X, over obligations to comply with EU guidelines.
The European Commission just lately fined X €120m (£105m) over its blue tick badges – the primary superb beneath the DSA. It stated the platform’s blue tick system was “deceptive” as a result of the agency was not “meaningfully verifying users”.
In response, Musk’s website blocked the Commission from making adverts on its platform.
Reacting to the visa ban, Breton posted on X: “To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is.”
Clare Melford, who leads the UK-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI), was additionally listed.
US Undersecretary of State Sarah B Rogers accused the GDI of utilizing US taxpayer cash “to exhort censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press”.
A GDI spokesperson instructed the BBC that “the visa sanctions announced today are an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship”.
“The Trump Administration is, once again, using the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with. Their actions today are immoral, unlawful, and un-American.”
Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that fights on-line hate and misinformation, was additionally handed a ban.
Rogers referred to as Mr Ahmed a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against US citizens”.
Also topic to bans had been Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of HateAssist, a German organisation that the State Department stated helped implement the DSA.
The BBC has reached out to the CCDH and HateAssist for remark.
Rubio stated that steps had been taken to impose visa restrictions on “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex who, as a result, will be generally barred from entering the United States”.
“President Trump has been clear that his America First foreign policy rejects violations of American sovereignty. Extraterritorial overreach by foreign censors targeting American speech is no exception,” he added.
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