State Department Protects Speech By Pulling Visas For Censors

No foreigner who targets Americans’ speech should have an inalienable right to come to our country and enjoy the freedoms he would deny us. Now, that is official U.S. policy.

Last Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Foggy Bottom will impose visa restrictions on two groups of global censors.

The first includes those officials who “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.” The second includes those officials who “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.” The policy may apply to family members, too, making it even more potent.

The Trump administration’s targeting of foreign censors marks a significant departure from a Biden administration that not only tolerated but coordinated with global speech police. The outgoing president sat mum as the likes of London’s top cop threatened to charge Elon Musk for thoughtcrimes. That is disfavored speech that authorities characterize as dangerous mis-, dis-, and mal-information.

So too did the administration abide, and in some instances collude with, authorities engaged in an even more insidious and widespread effort. Such authorities from Latin America to Europe and beyond seek to suppress speech at mass scale through regulations that threaten the financial ruin of social media platforms that help spread anti-establishment news and views.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is arguably the most powerful and pervasive such speech dragnet. It threatens American social media platforms with crippling fines should they fail to adhere to content moderation standards that arguably abridge Americans’ protected speech. Americans in turn, face the collateral damage of alien speech codes being imposed on American companies under financial duress.

Last fall, in related reporting for RealClearInvestigations, I asked the Biden State Department whether it would defend American companies targeted under the DSA. A spokesperson replied, “We are engaging with our European colleagues on some specific concerns…which we believe would make it easier to achieve transatlantic cooperation and alignment on these critical issues.”

Team Biden never neutralized the foreign regulatory threat. Even more egregious, congressional oversight and evidence unearthed by America First Legal suggests the prior administration colluded with foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations working to impose censorship regimes on U.S. social media platforms, including in Brazil and the United Kingdom.

The State Department’s policy is in keeping with President Trump’s first-day executive order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” in which the president pledged to work to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech.”

It is also in keeping with Vice President J.D. Vance’s provocative remarks in February at the Munich Security Conference. He lamented that “free speech, I fear, is in retreat” across Europe, while pushing back on European governments’ efforts to suppress political speech abhorred by its establishment.

Then, he said, “just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.” Now, that statement has teeth.

As of yet it is not public to whom the State Department’s policy will apply. But presumably, those engaging in conduct like former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton — who repeatedly threatened Musk and X with reprisals under the DSA — might be prohibited from traveling to the United States. It would not be surprising if Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has targeted X and video platform Rumble for censorship, also lands in Foggy Bottom’s crosshairs.

The Trump administration’s first-day executive order on free speech calls for the administration to review the Biden administration’s censorship activities. That probe could yield further evidence of collusion with foreign censors, leaving them liable to travel restrictions under the new State Department policy.

At the dawn of the second Trump administration, Rubio declared that “The State Department I lead will support and defend Americans’ rights to free speech, terminating any programs that in any way lead to censoring the American people.” With this new policy, those efforts now encompass protecting the free speech rights of American citizens from speech police operating abroad.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.