Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg lead a German legal aid organization that assists individuals facing online abuse and violent threats.
Clare Melford runs a British group that helps identify disinformation.
Imran Ahmed is a British activist who runs an organization that has chronicled anti-vaccination content on social media.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration accused all of them of a campaign of censorship against Americans.
The four individuals, along with a former senior European Commission official, Thierry Breton of France, were barred from entering the United States after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them “radical activists” who undercut free speech.
On Wednesday, European officials including President Emmanuel Macron of France criticized the Trump administration’s decision.
“These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty,” Mr. Macron said on social media. “The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”
Thomas Régnier, a spokesman for the European Commission, said, “Our digital rules ensure a safe, fair and level playing field for all companies, applied fairly and without discrimination.”
The travel ban is a major escalation in a dispute between the Trump administration and Europe over the regulation of online content and social media.
In the United States, free speech protections allow social media companies to set their own content policies. And Mr. Trump and others on the right have successfully pushed social media firms to roll back moderation rules that they viewed as silencing conservative voices.
In Britain and the European Union, there are certain restrictions on hate speech and open bigotry. In 2022, the European Union passed a law called the Digital Services Act that requires social media companies to meet transparency standards and to remove certain racist, antisemitic and violent content if it violates national laws.
The Trump administration sees the Digital Services Act as an attempt to force American platforms to censor speech globally — an allegation European officials deny.
The issue came to a head this month when the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X $140 million. The commission said that the site had violated the Digital Services Act by selling verification check marks that allow users to mislead others about their identities, by maintaining opaque advertising practices and by refusing to provide researchers with data access. In response, Mr. Musk said the European Union should be abolished.
Mr. Breton helped draft the digital services law when he was a European commissioner overseeing digital policy.
The other individuals facing a travel ban were involved in nonprofit organizations that the Trump administration accused of targeting American social media companies and users.
Ms. Ballon, co-chief executive of HateAid, a German group that assists victims of online attacks, said she received an email on Tuesday notifying her that her visa had been revoked. She did not understand why until a few hours later, when she saw a news article about Mr. Rubio’s announcement.
HateAid, founded in 2018, provides counseling, safety advice and litigation financing to help victims of online attacks take legal action against perpetrators. The group, which Ms. Ballon runs with Ms. von Hodenberg, also lobbies for stronger regulation of social media companies in Germany and the rest of the European Union.
German officials came to the organization’s defense on Wednesday after the Trump administration accused it of countering conservative groups.
“The entry bans imposed by the USA, including those against the chairpersons of HateAid, are not acceptable,” Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, said on social media.
Ms. Ballon and Ms. von Hodenberg said in a statement, “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.”
Ms. Melford runs the Global Disinformation Index, a group that provides risk ratings to advertising firms to help them avoid placing ads on websites seen as spreading disinformation and harmful content. In a statement, the group called the travel ban “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.”
Mr. Ahmed is the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has teams in Britain and the United States. Mr. Musk sued the group in 2023 after the organization documented a rise in hate speech on Twitter following his acquisition of the platform, which is now called X. An American court dismissed the lawsuit last year as a violation of the right to free speech.
Mr. Ahmed could not be reached for comment.
Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London.
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