State Department Bans Five Europeans Over Censorship of Americans

In a bold move signaling that the Trump administration is serious about protecting the First Amendment, the State Department has banned five high-profile European figures from entering the United States. The reason? Their direct involvement in suppressing the free speech of Americans through coordinated international censorship campaigns.

Announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the travel bans are part of a broader effort to dismantle what Rubio calls the “global censorship-industrial complex” a network of bureaucrats and activists who’ve spent years pressuring U.S. tech companies to silence American viewpoints they don’t like.

“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio said. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”

The five figures now banned from U.S. soil include:

• Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner and architect of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the European censorship law that’s been used to punish Elon Musk’s platform X.

• Imran Ahmed, the British head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which infamously collaborated with the Biden administration to blacklist so-called “anti-vaxxers” like RFK Jr., now Trump’s HHS Secretary.

• Clare Melford, CEO of the Global Disinformation Index, which flagged conservative media like The Daily Wire and The Federalist as “risky” to advertisers.

• Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of Germany’s HateAid, a group that works with European regulators to silence Right-wing voices online.

This isn’t just about censorship it’s about foreign influence targeting American citizens. Under the guise of “disinformation,” these groups lobbied social media platforms to throttle or ban accounts that didn’t toe the progressive line. They labeled debate as danger, and truth as toxicity.

Consider this:

• In 2021, the Biden White House cited Ahmed’s “Disinformation Dozen” report to pressure Facebook into censoring 12 accounts one of which was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• The Global Disinformation Index used U.S. taxpayer dollars, funneled through a Biden-era program, to discourage advertisers from supporting conservative news outlets.

• The European Commission recently fined X (formerly Twitter) under the DSA for refusing to silence users, prompting direct warnings from both Rubio and Trump.

French President Emmanuel Macron, predictably outraged, accused the U.S. of “coercion” and undermining “European digital sovereignty.” But the real coercion was coming from Brussels and Berlin where speech gets filtered through the lens of political correctness and wrongthink is punished without mercy.

On U.S. soil, that ends now.

Trump, who has made protecting free speech a central issue of his campaign and presidency, warned that the EU's censorship crusade poses a real threat to liberty. “Europe is going in some bad directions,” he said earlier this month. “It’s very bad for the people.”

Rubio echoed that sentiment in a recent interview: “Are we going to live in a world where some American puts up a social media post and then gets to some airport somewhere and is arrested?”

This decisive action by the Trump administration makes it clear America will not bow to foreign bureaucrats, nor allow Silicon Valley to be used as a tool of global censorship.

The First Amendment is not negotiable, and the days of surrendering it to European technocrats are over.

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