(Dec 24): The Trump administration on Tuesday imposed visa sanctions on former European Union (EU) commissioner Thierry Breton and four other people for trying to make American tech companies police political speech on their platforms.
“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organised efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on the X social media platform. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
Rubio added that US officials “stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course”.
Besides Breton, the State Department also targeted activists and non-profits focused on digital hate speech and countering extremism. That includes Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the UK-based Global Disinformation Index’s Clare Melford, as well as Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of Germany’s HateAid, which flags far-right hate speech online.
The Global Disinformation Index in a statement called the sanctions “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship,” accusing the Trump administration of using its power to “intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with.”
Breton, in a post on X, said the European law was voted in with broad-based support. “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’”
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The EU and White House have repeatedly clashed over free speech and tech regulation, with Trump ally Elon Musk’s X social media network slapped with a €120 million fine earlier this month for violating the EU’s controversial content-moderation law. An EU official denied that move was about censorship, saying it was focused on transparency.
In a post on X, French President Emmanuel Macron said the EU’s digital regulations “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 bloc’s rules governing its digital space “are not meant to be determined outside Europe,” the post read.
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German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig said the US accusations against Berlin-based HateAid were “unacceptable” and that von Hodenberg and Ballon had her government’s “support and solidarity”.
“The rules by which we want to live in the digital sphere in Germany and Europe are not decided in Washington,” Hubig said on Wednesday in an emailed statement.
“HateAid supports victims but the organisation itself does not prohibit any expression of opinion,” she added.
Von Hodenberg and Ballon, Co-CEOs of HateAid, said the move marked a new escalation in “questioning European sovereignty.”
The broadside against former European officials also comes weeks after President Donald Trump released an unconventional national security strategy that accused Europe of facing “civilisational erasure” as a result of economic decline and mass migration.
The ideological document attacked European leaders over censorship and suppressing political opposition, and was widely interpreted by Europe’s established political parties as the Trump administration offering support to Europe’s far-right, anti-immigrant political parties.
It echoed familiar attacks on the continent, including a high-profile speech from Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, where he accused Europe’s mainstream parties of suppressing speech.
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