The Trump administration is barring five prominent Europeans from the United States, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Tuesday, accusing them of being involved in online censorship of Americans, a claim they have disputed.
The action sharply escalated the administration’s fight against European efforts to monitor content on major social media platforms, including Elon Musk’s X as well as Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta.
The five include Thierry Breton, a former member of the European Commission whom the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, Sarah B. Rogers, called “a mastermind” of the Digital Services Act, a European law meant to oversee harmful or manipulative content online.
The European Union imposed its first penalty under the law this month, leveling a $140 million fine against X for practices that misled users, obscured advertisers and denied researchers access to internal practices — not, as Mr. Musk claimed, for refusing to censor content.
The others are prominent researchers with nonpartisan, nongovernment organizations in Europe that have fought disinformation, hate speech and other harmful content online. Mr. Rubio said in a statement that those targeted “have led 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 — in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” he added.
The statement underscored the administration’s close alignment with the biggest platforms, whose executives threw their support behind President Trump and have openly urged his administration to push back on European regulations that could force them to do more to regulate harmful content.
Even before Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, the platforms began significantly reducing efforts to moderate content online, led by Mr. Musk, who claims to be a free speech absolutist.
The travel bans stunned experts who have tracked disinformation. They said the administration was basing the restrictions on the belief that what some Republicans have called a “censorship industrial complex” inside the government had colluded with researchers and social media companies to censor conservative Americans.
A federal lawsuit based on that claim, brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, reached the Supreme Court last year, but the court dismissed it on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not demonstrate any government actions that caused them harm.
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Even so, since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House in January, he and his aides have vilified efforts to fight disinformation and other manipulative content online. They have issued executive orders, dismantled federal departments that monitored such content and cut funding for any research that touches on its prevalence.
“They’re not doing this because they have any evidence of censorship — they lost a Supreme Court case that made those claims,” said Nina Jankowicz, the head of the American Sunlight Project, an advocacy group that fights online disinformation. “They’re doing this because the group of researchers and advocates have stood up to liars like Donald Trump and the platforms that enable them.”
Mr. Rubio cited the State Department’s authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to deny entry to anyone who “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
The five Europeans also include Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which Mr. Musk sued in 2023 after the organization documented a rise in hate speech on Twitter following his acquisition of the platform. A court dismissed the lawsuit last year as a violation of the right to free speech that Mr. Musk claims to champion.
The restriction could amount to deportation for Mr. Ahmed, who recently settled in the United States with his family. He could not be immediately reached for comment.
The others, according to a series of posts on X by Ms. Rogers, are Clare Melford, who leads the British-based Global Disinformation Index, and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, both leaders of HateAid, a group based in Germany. Ms. Rogers cited an interview that Ms. Ballon gave on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in which she said, “Free speech needs boundaries.”
In a statement, the Global Disinformation Index denounced the travel ban as “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.” Referring to the administration officials, the statement added, “Their actions today are immoral, unlawful and un-American.”
Mr. Breton and the others did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an American organization that seeks to protect digital rights and privacy, called the announcement “chilling and unconstitutional.” She said the administration was silencing its critics in the name of protecting free speech.
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul.
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