The United States has imposed visa bans on five Europeans, including a former European Union commissioner, accusing them of pressuring tech firms to censor and suppress \u201cAmerican viewpoints they oppose\u201d.<\/p>\n
In a statement on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterised the individuals as \u201cradical activists\u201d who had \u201cadvanced censorship crackdowns\u201d by foreign states against \u201cAmerican speakers and American companies\u201d.<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
\u201cFor far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,\u201d he said on X.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The most prominent target was Thierry Breton, who served as the European commissioner for the internal market from 2019-2024.<\/p>\n
Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary for public diplomacy, described the French businessman as the \u201cmastermind\u201d of the EU\u2019s Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law intended to combat \u200bhateful speech, misinformation and disinformation on online platforms.<\/p>\n
Rogers also accused Breton of using the DSA to threaten Elon Musk, the owner of X and a close ally of US President Donald Trump, ahead of an interview Musk conducted with Trump during last year\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n
\u2018Witch hunt\u2019<\/p>\n
Breton responded to the visa ban in a post on X, slamming it as a \u201cwitch hunt\u201d and comparing the situation with the US\u2019s McCarthy era, when officials were chased out of government for alleged ties to communism.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo our American friends: Censorship isn\u2019t where you think it is,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The others named by Rogers are: Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German organisation, and Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).<\/p>\n
French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot \u201cstrongly\u201d condemned the visa restrictions, stating that the EU \u201ccannot let the rules governing their digital space be imposed by others upon them\u201d. He stressed that the DSA was \u201cdemocratically adopted in Europe\u201d and that \u201cit has absolutely no extraterritorial reach and in no way affects the United States\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ballon and von Holdenberg of HateAid described the visa bans as an attempt to obstruct the enforcement of European law on US corporations operating in Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will not be \u200cintimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand \u2060up for human rights and freedom of expression,\u201d they said in a statement.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the GDI also called the US action \u201cimmoral, unlawful, and un-American\u201d, as well as \u201can authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship\u201d.<\/p>\n
The punitive measures follow the Trump administration\u2019s publishing of a National Security Strategy, which accused European leaders of censoring free speech and suppressing opposition to immigration policies that it said risk \u201ccivilisational erasure\u201d for the continent.<\/p>\n
The DSA in particular has emerged as a flashpoint in US-EU relations, with US conservatives decrying it as a weapon of censorship against right-wing thought in Europe and beyond, an accusation Brussels denies.<\/p>\n
The legislation requires major platforms to explain content-moderation decisions, provide transparency for users and grant researchers access to study issues such as children\u2019s exposure to dangerous content.<\/p>\n
Tensions escalated further this month after the EU fined Musk\u2019s X for violating DSA rules on transparency in advertising and its methods for ensuring users were verified and actual people.<\/p>\n
Washington last week signalled that key European businesses \u2013 including Accenture, DHL, Mistral, Siemens and Spotify \u2013 could be targeted in response.<\/p>\n
The US has also attacked the United Kingdom\u2019s Online Safety Act, which imposes similar content moderation requirements on major social media platforms.<\/p>\n
The White House last week suspended the implementation of a tech cooperation deal with the UK, saying it was in opposition to the UK\u2019s tech rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States has imposed visa bans on five Europeans, including a former European Union commissioner, accusing them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,101,1076,5335,594,3,21,19,22,20,25,1209,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-366802","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-european-union","12":"tag-france","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-united-states-of-america","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-us-canada","20":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}