State Department Sanctions Foreign Operatives for Censoring Americans

The sanctions are the Trump administration’s first direct counter-strike against an emerging global censorship regime

The State Department on Tuesday announced a round of visa sanctions against influential foreign figures who have engaged in the “extraterritorial censorship of Americans.”

“If you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil,” Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers wrote on X.

Rogers described those sanctioned as part of a sprawling “censorship-NGO ecosystem”—a network of government offices and nonprofit groups that pressure tech platforms to suppress disfavored viewpoints far beyond their own borders.

The first name on the list is Thierry Breton, the former European Internal Market Commissioner who helped design and enforce the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The law compels social media companies to aggressively police “misinformation” and “harmful” content.

While still in office, Breton repeatedly warned Elon Musk that X could face penalties for violating the DSA. Although Breton stepped down in September 2024, the threat was fulfilled: in December 2025, the EU fined X roughly $140 million under the DSA.

On Tuesday, Rogers confirmed Breton is now among those sanctioned.

Another target is Imran Ahmed, founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit operating in both the U.S. and U.K. CCDH was founded by British political insiders, including Ahmed Morgan McSweeney, now chief of staff to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and has worked closely with governments to push online censorship policies.

CCDH has taken credit for helping drive Britain’s Online Safety Act, which allows authorities to police “harmful communications” online. During the pandemic, the group produced the widely criticized “disinformation dozen” report, urging platforms to remove twelve Americans who questioned COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. One of those named was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now HHS secretary.

The organization also advised the Kamala Harris campaign during the 2024 election and once listed as an objective the goal to “kill Musk’s Twitter” because of Musk’s absolutist approach to free speech. CCDH activists met with senior U.S. officials, including Rep. Adam Schiff, as part of efforts to undermine X after Musk took over.

The State Department also sanctioned Clare Melford, head of the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The GDI rates news outlets as “risky” or “less risky” based on the level of perceived “hate speech” and “disinformation.” Conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and The Blaze are deemed “risky,” while far-Left outlets like The New York Times, NPR, and HuffPost are rated “less risky.” Major ad platforms, including Microsoft’s Xandr, have avoided advertising on sites flagged as “risky” by the GDI.

Under the Biden administration, the GDI received funding from the now-defunct State Department Global Engagement Center and from the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S.-backed foundation often described as a CIA cutout.

Also sanctioned were Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, co-leaders of HateAid, a German organization founded after the country’s 2017 elections to counter right-wing movements. HateAid is a designated “trusted flagger” under the DSA, giving it special authority to report content for removal. The group routinely pushes for expanded access to platforms’ internal data to aid censorship efforts.

Von Hodenberg has warned of “right-wing extremist disinformation” ahead of U.S. and EU elections, arguing for stricter enforcement of the DSA. Ballon, meanwhile, made her position plain in a February 2025 60 Minutes interview aired in the U.S.: “Free speech needs boundaries.” Months earlier, she vowed to curb the “emotionalization of debates” by regulating online platforms.

The sanctions represent the Trump administration’s first direct counter-strike against an emerging global censorship regime.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported in October that Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center hosted a private meeting with officials from Europe, the U.K., Brazil, California, and Australia to discuss coordinated censorship enforcement.

Such coordination could allow content removed under one country’s rules to disappear worldwide. It could mean an American meme taken down for violating U.K. hate-speech standards—or investigative reporting on elections or corruption quietly scrubbed from search results to avoid regulatory penalties.

Those fears intensified in November, when the European Commission unveiled its “European Democracy Shield.” The initiative is billed as a way to protect democracy from foreign interference and online disinformation, but it grants Brussels unprecedented control over speech.

The plan calls for demonetizing “disinformation,” empowering fact-checkers, and forming new disinformation task forces. EU officials have already pointed to legal actions against TikTok over alleged “election risks” and signaled a possible investigation into Telegram for supposedly enabling criminal activity and foreign interference.

It also includes sweeping “media literacy” programs—especially for students—designed to teach citizens how to “identify disinformation”. Critics say those efforts amount to promoting government-approved narratives. Former State Department official Mike Benz has called media literacy programs “essentially regime media installation.”

The Democracy Shield’s reach doesn’t stop at Europe’s borders. The EU plans to extend it to neighboring regions, including the Western Balkans, parts of Africa, and beyond, while coordinating with the G7, NATO, the OECD, and the United Nations.

For the Trump administration, the sanctions are a warning shot: efforts to regulate speech abroad won’t be allowed to quietly reshape what Americans can say, read, or share at home.