US will ban foreign officials to punish countries for social media rules

The US State Department has launched its latest rebuke against Europe and other countries over their attempts to regulate digital platforms.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday that the US would restrict visas for “foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States.” He called it “unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil” and “for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States.”

It’s not yet clear how or against whom the policy will be enforced, but seems to implicate Europe’s Digital Services Act, a law that came into effect in 2023 with the goal of making online platforms safer by imposing requirements on the largest platforms around removing illegal content and providing transparency about their content moderation. Though it’s not mentioned directly in the press release about the visa restrictions, the Trump administration has slammed the law on multiple occasions, including in remarks earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance.

The State Department’s homepage currently links to an article on its official Substack, where senior advisor for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Samuel Samson critiques the DSA as a tool to “silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation.” He adds that, “Independent regulators now police social media companies, including prominent American platforms like X, and threaten immense fines for non-compliance with their strict speech regulations.”

“We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty,” Rubio says in the announcement, “especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech.”