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One day before Christmas Eve, a bombshell announcement from the U.S. State Department is making waves across Europe—and beyond. Five Europeans, prominent figures in the new digital order, including former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, have been sanctioned by banning them from entering American territory.
“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organised efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship. Today, the State Department will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States. We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on his official X account.
In a post published an hour later, Under Secretary of State Sarah Rogers mentioned the names of the five people whom the Trump administration no longer wants on American soil. The first of these is the former Commissioner for Internal Market and Digital Affairs, Thierry Breton, who has dedicated himself, “since the first day I took office,” according to his own statements, to implementing the Digital Services Act, a notorious law which, under the guise of “reforming our digital space,” is a tool for monitoring, sanctioning, and silencing conservative or anti-establishment opinions.
It was Breton who warned Elon Musk in August 2024 about the “legal obligation to ensure X’s compliance with EU law and in particular the DSA in the EU,” ahead of a conversation broadcast live on X between Donald Trump, then a candidate for the US presidency, and the platform’s boss. The very same Thierry Breton stated in an interview in January 2025, after the cancellation of the presidential elections in Romania and before the parliamentary elections in Germany: “We did it in Romania and we will obviously have to do it if it is necessary in Germany.” A statement that sparked a lot of backlash.
On the sanction list imposed by the State Department are also the heads of two “not-for-profit” British organizations, Imrah Ahmed and Clare Melford. Ahmed is the CEO of The Center for Countering Digital Hate, and Melford is the founder of the Global Disinformation Index, both two entities extremely active in anti-“hate-speech” activism, in fact hunting down anyone who has views different from the official dogma on climate change or so-called anti-vaxxers, for instance. The two others who have been barred from entering the United States are Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, representatives of a German organization, HateAid, which officially acts to combat “systematic disinformation and digital violence,” which we all know what that really means: censorship, rewriting the present and the past, and absolute control over public narrative.
France’s reaction was prompt, with both President Macron and Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noel Barrot “strongly condemning” the visa restrictions imposed by the US State Department and defending the digital regulations “adopted following a democratic and sovereign process by the European Parliament and Council.”
Anyone who claims to be surprised by this decision either hasn’t understood anything or is pretending not to have understood anything from the statements or signals issued by JD Vance and Marco Rubio over the last months. Protecting and championing free speech is one of the crucial objectives of the current US administration, which is why the double standards practiced by certain European politicians with autocratic reflexes, in direct coordination with far-left activists disguised as relentless fighters against “hate and misinformation,” are triggering countermeasures.
The final phrase of Marco Rubio’s post is yet another warning: “We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course”. This very dangerous course must come to an end. A profound reform of the digital space is imperative, but not by suppressing those voices that “dare” to speak the truth. Even if it is inconvenient.