US Sanctions Former EU Official, Others In Swipe At Europe

The Trump administration on Tuesday imposed visa sanctions on former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton and four other people for trying to make American tech companies police political speech on their platforms.

“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on the X social media platform. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”

Rubio added that US officials “stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”

Besides Breton, the State Department also targeted activists and non-profits focused on digital hate speech and countering extremism. That includes Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the UK-based Global Disinformation Index’s Clare Melford, as well as Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of Germany’s HateAid, which flags far-right hate speech online.

The Global Disinformation Index in a statement called the sanctions “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship,” accusing the Trump administration of using its power to “intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with.”

Breton, in a post on X, said the European law was voted in with broad-based support. “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.’”

The EU and White House have repeatedly clashed over free speech and tech regulation, with Trump ally Elon Musk’s X social media network slapped with a €120 million ($140 million) fine earlier this month for violating the EU’s controversial content-moderation law. An EU official denied that move was about censorship, saying it was focused on transparency.

The broadside against former European officials also comes weeks after President Donald Trump released an unconventional national security strategy that accused Europe of facing “civilizational erasure” as a result of economic decline and mass migration.

The ideological document attacked European leaders over censorship and suppressing political opposition, and was widely interpreted by Europe’s established political parties as the Trump administration offering support to Europe’s far-right, anti-immigrant political parties.

It echoed familiar attacks on the continent, including a high-profile speech from Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, where he accused Europe’s mainstream parties of suppressing speech.