I’m writing from Europe, where I’m slated to speak at an event on information integrity and the future of journalism, and apparently I am surrounded by censors. This, at least, is the position of the Trump administration, which has spent this second term deploying tariff ultimatums, visa bans, deportation threats, and a panoply of other threats against regulators, researchers, and nonprofits it accuses of suppressing American speech.
Researchers who study platform content moderation, algorithms, online hate speech, children’s exposure to harmful content, and advertising practices are now subject to deportation and banned from entering the land of the First Amendment. They did not break any law. They did not harm anyone. They literally study an issue and develop policy recommendations (by the way, this is what I do). Several of those affected are members of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, where I’m a member (the name pretty much sums up the organization).
The Trump administration has framed its repressive actions as a response to “censorship” of Americans online under the theory that researchers and advocates who study content moderation are somehow complicit in suppressing American speech. Obviously, this is ridiculous, it’s also illegal. Which is why CITR filed suit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last week. The case, filed with free speech colleagues at the Knight First Amendment Institute and Protect Democracy, challenges the policy of targeting noncitizen researchers, fact-checkers, and trust and safety workers for visa denials, revocations, detention, and deportation based on their work studying social media and online harms.
The lawsuit’s rejoinder to Trumpian doublespeak is that punishing researchers for their viewpoints and their professional associations violates the First Amendment rights not just of the researchers themselves, but of their U.S. citizen colleagues who have a constitutional interest in hearing from them.
As the complaint and my own experience talking to colleagues in Europe make clear, the chilling effect has been immediate and severe as noncitizen (and citizen!) researchers are curtailing their work, withdrawing from public advocacy, reconsidering whether they can continue working and studying in the US at all. Last year Rubio imposed visa bans on five Europeans under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act normally reserved for security threats, accusing them of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.” The targets included Thierry Breton, the former EU Commissioner who helped draft the Digital Services Act (which gives social media users in Europe some basic rights related to content moderation and was democratically enacted with support from nearly 90% of the European Parliament and all 27 EU member states), and the leaders of groups like the Global Disinformation Index, which tracks and reports on disinfo.
Breton compared the visa bans to McCarthyism, named after the disgraced Senator who claimed to be protecting the country from a foreign ideology. But the current administration is using the machinery of national security to protect tech corporations and the Broligarchy from transparency and accountability while calling that protection liberty. JD Vance also reached back to the Cold War era in a pivotal speech last February, calling EU commissioners “commissars” and arguing that European content rules were the real threat to democracy, not American strongarming against democratically enacted legislation.
The doublespeak has only become more insidious as the apparatus of U.S. foreign policy has been deployed to protect the richest and most powerful corporations in the world that control our expression, our data, our ability to seek and receive information (do recall this is a right protected under international human rights law).
Since then, the pressure has intensified considerably. The Trump administration issued an ultimatum to the EU, threatening to deploy “every tool at its disposal” to retaliate against what it describes as unfair targeting of Silicon Valley giants, including potentially imposing fees on European services operating in American markets such as Spotify and DHL. The Office of the US Trade Representative accused European regulators of pursuing a “persistent course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines, and directives against US service providers.”
This is not an isolated incident, and it is not only happening abroad. We have seen an even greater level of repression and censorship at home and it is part of a broader and increasingly coherent campaign to weaponize the language of free speech against the infrastructure of accountability both domestically and internationally.
These campaigns reflect the same operational logic: accountability for platforms equals censorship of Americans, and any institutional check on concentrated platform power, whether conducted by a European regulator or academics, is an attack on free speech. My colleague Max von Thun and I documented this campaign in our October 2025 policy brief Platform Power, Free Speech, and Political Interference: Defending Europe’s Digital Sovereignty which we launched at an event in Brussels that urged Europe to stand strong against US intimidation. What has happened since we published it has confirmed this argument faster than we anticipated. The DSA and DMA do not target U.S. firms specifically, they apply to any firm meeting certain size criteria, and their substantive aims are pretty conventional regulatory ones: consumer protection and fair competition. The administration knows this, but of cours the point was never accuracy. It’s pressure.
At a time when AI is rapidly changing our lives and economy and people are already worried about their freedom and safety online, not to mention their cognitive liberty as tech firms roll out companions and chatbots with few if any regulations to protect our freedom, independent researchers are needed more than ever. This policy is meant to censor researchers into silence and keep the public in the dark, which is why we are fighting back.
The CITR lawsuit is a start, but it is a drop in the bucket. A lawsuit is a petition, not a remedy, and with the Supreme Court regularly failing to provide meaningful constraints on executive power and maintain the balance our system was designed to ensure, I am not holding my breath. Piece by piece I feel like I’m watching as a new system is constructed in which the US government decides who is allowed to study global American platforms, which foreign democracies are permitted to regulate them, and which speech acts constitute censorship worthy of sanction. This is a protection racket dressed in First Amendment language, paraded out in executive orders and weaponized lawfare, and backed by the wealthiest corporations and people in the world spearheading the inevitability of the AI revolution.