Europe pushes back at Trump’s ‘authoritarian’ sanctions on anti-disinformation figures

LONDON — European allies reacted with outrage Wednesday after the Trump administration sanctioned online safety campaigners accused of censoring “American viewpoints.”

The five people Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned from entering the United States include a former top European Union official and four high-profile activists against hate speech and disinformation on social media.

Rubio accused the five sanctioned figures of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”

These “radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states,” he added, using the acronym to refer to nongovernmental organizations. “The Trump administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”

It marks a dramatic escalation of Washington’s war on what it sees as censorship from across the Atlantic. Europe has previously seen Vice President JD Vance berate its leaders over perceived failures on free speech.

For many on the continent and elsewhere, however, the move comes as an amplification of the Trump administration’s own crackdown on viewpoints that don’t align with its own.

The pushback from Washington also comes after European attempts to regulate American tech giants such as the Elon Musk-owned platform X, which was fined 120 million euros (around $140 million) by the European Union earlier this month for “breaching transparency obligations.”

The European Commission, which is the E.U.’s executive arm, as well as the German Justice Ministry and French President Emmanuel Macron all condemned the move.

Macron called it “intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.”

The European Commission warned that “if needed, we will respond swiftly and decisively to defend our regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures,” while European Council President António Costa said that “such measures are unacceptable between allies, partners, and friends.”

The most high-profile figure given a visa ban was Thierry Breton, the European Commission’s former top technology regulator, described by the State Department as the “mastermind” of a landmark piece of legislation called the Digital Services Act.

Musk said back in 2022 that he supported the law, but began to change with the fine against X — the first under the new legal powers — which he called “bulls—.” He has also referred to Breton as a “tyrant of Europe,” while Rubio and JD Vance both condemned the fine.

“Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?” Breton wrote on X, referring to the 1950s anti-communist campaign led by Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’”

Also sanctioned was Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which says it holds to account social media companies that “erode basic human rights and civil liberties by enabling the spread of online hate and disinformation.”

Sarah B. Rogers, the under secretary of state, called Ahmed a “key collaborator with the Biden administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.”

Next on the list was Clare Melford, head of the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit organization based in the United Kingdom that tries to tackle disinformation. Rogers accused the group of using American “taxpayer money to exhort censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press.”

The State Department also sanctioned Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, both co-leaders of the German nonprofit HateAid, whose mission statement is to “strengthen democracy in digital space” by providing legal support to victims of “digital violence.”

Hodenberg and Ballon told NBC News in a statement that this was “an act of repression by a government that is increasingly disregarding the rule of law and trying to silence its critics by any means necessary.”

They added: “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression.”

The Global Disinformation Index condemned the measures as an “authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.”

It added: “Only the bullies and petty fascists of the Trump administration could miss the irony of decrying “speech suppression” while using state power to silence critics engaging in protected speech.”

The French Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, alleged double standards between how the U.S. was treating its old European allies and its historical adversaries in Russia as it negotiates for peace in Ukraine.

“Hey @StateDept, did you know this guy you invited in Miami is an official from a country where American platforms are banned?” the ministry wrote on X. Beside the text was a photo of Kirill Dmitriev, envoy to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has just come back from diplomatic talks in Florida.

Putin’s regime has banned Facebook and Instagram and severely throttled other platforms such as X, formerly Twitter.

NBC News has reached out to the State Department for comment on the reactions, and contacted the Center for Countering Digital Hate for a response.

The sanctions are a new high watermark for the Trump administration’s war on what it calls European censorship. The White House has portrayed its actions as necessary to break the decadeslong liberal bias held by media and government elites, while for critics, it is an attempt to silence dissent and promote illiberal, often hate, speech online.

Last month, many in Europe were aghast when Trump’s national security strategy railed against the E.U. for undermining “political liberty and sovereignty,” adopting “migration policies that are transforming the continent,” and “creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”