Marco Rubio is using real censorship to fight fake censorship

The US government just banned five people from entering the country because it didn’t like what they said. According to the State Department, the ban is necessary to protect free speech.

If this sounds crazy to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension skills.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department announced an “Action Announcement to Combat the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex” that will “take decisive action against five individuals who have led an organized effort to coerce U.S. platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American views they oppose.” The five individuals – former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, Center to Combat Digital Hate (CCDH) CEO Imran Ahmed Ahmed, Global Disinformation Index (GDI) co-founder Clare Melford, and Hate Aid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon — are now barred from obtaining U.S. visas.

Never mind that the abuse was stopped. Never mind that the system will correct itself. The State Department wants to punish him again — for his comments.

The theory relies almost entirely on fabricated or grossly distorted evidence. When it came under actual scrutiny — including three years of litigation and congressional investigations in Murthy v. Missouri — it collapsed. The court found no evidence of coercion. Platform executives testified under oath that they never felt forced to adjust to government requests. The whole thing is nonsense, but has become gospel in MAGA circles.

I have long been critical of the EU’s Digital Services Act – a sweeping attempt to regulate social media that relies on vague definitions and subjective decisions. I also singled out Breton for trying to twist the DSA to claim authority over speech on a platform he never had, and Ahmed for presenting shoddy research that overstated the risks of social media. But the U.S. government is now punishing them for their speech, which is exactly the kind of government suppression of speech that the First Amendment is intended to prevent.

The most instructive example here is Brittany herself. In fact, he did try to abuse the DSA to suppress speech. In August 2024, he sent a threatening letter to Elon Musk, suggesting that Musk’s planned live-streamed interview with then-candidate Donald Trump might violate the DSA. This is a blatant attempt at censorship.

Here’s the thing: the EU rejected him. Completely. EU officials publicly condemned the letter, his fellow commissioners distanced themselves from his threats, and he resigned weeks later to avoid being fired. As EU free speech experts noted in a recent open letter: “Politically, the EU’s checks and balances work.”

What is the US government’s response to this? Banned from leaving the country for trying to suppress speech. Never mind that he was already punished for it. Never mind that the abuse was stopped. Never mind that the system will correct itself. The State Department wants to punish him again — for his comments.

The reasons for all this are even worse. Deputy Secretary of State Sarah Rogers claimed the five Europeans engaged in “Muti-style suppression of speech.”

Rogers was referring to the aforementioned Murthy v. Missouri case, in which two states and a group of angry social media influencers sued the Biden administration, claiming social media platforms were censoring content at the direction of the government. The Supreme Court rejected the claims 6-3, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion finding the plaintiffs had no standing because there was no evidence the government had suppressed anyone’s speech. Barrett noted that these platforms are simply enforcing their own rules.

Worse, Judge Barrett emphasized in a footnote that the lower court’s conclusion that censorship existed was based on a “manifestly erroneous” reading of the evidence.

Therefore, the State Department cited a case rebutting government censorship as evidence of government censorship. It’s not even creative lying – it’s just using your own loss as a precedent.

With the exception of Breton, the other four sanctioned individuals did not even hold government positions that would allow them to suppress speech. CCDH uses its rhetoric (which is admittedly often inaccurate and misleading) to call on companies to change their content moderation policies. This is advocacy. It’s their own free speech to try to convince the company to make a different decision.

HateAid’s leaders were sanctioned as “trusted whistleblowers” under the DSA, which sounds sinister until you understand what that means: They can report content to social media platforms, just like everyone else. The “trusted” part simply means that the platform reviews its reports first, as they tend to be more accurate than random reports.

The platform remains at its sole discretion whether to remove any content. This is the same as the Supreme Court’s holding in the Murthy case that content moderation procedures do not constitute government censorship.

Here’s where we are now: The U.S. government is blocking people from entering the country because they advocate content moderation policies that the government doesn’t like. It defended this by citing a Supreme Court case that rejected claims of government censorship. It does so in the name of protecting free speech.

The only real suppression of speech in the government is the State Department, led by Marco Rubio. Everything else — all the censorship they claim to fight — is either a decision made by the private company itself or has been rejected and punished by the system it purportedly threatens.

If you wanted to be wary of government suppression of speech, you wouldn’t ban people in your own country for expressing opinions on content moderation. You especially don’t do this when you’re pretending to be a protector of free speech.

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