Three Questions Prompted by Rubio’s Threatened Visa Restrictions on ‘Foreign Nationals Who Censor Americans’

On Wednesday, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a “Visa Restriction Policy Targeting Foreign Nationals Who Censor Americans.” Under his statutory authority to determine whose entry “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” Rubio said he will not tolerate visits by foreign officials who “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States.” In a post on X that accompanied the announcement, Rubio said, “Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.”

The announcement is both broad and vague enough to cover a range of ways that foreign officials, under their respective legal frameworks, influence content moderation on social media platforms, even in response to legitimate concerns such as hate speech, election interference, disinformation, or perhaps even incitement to violence. And it appears to be motivated by longstanding grievances held by Trump and his MAGA allies.

For instance, Rubio’s specific mention of Latin America seems to point toward Brazil, where a Brazilian supreme court justice drew heavy criticism for issuing an order to X to remove posts by right-wing extremists following a coup attempt in that country in 2023. The conflict between Justice Alexandre de Moraes and billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of X, resulted in the suspension of the platform in Brazil, which lasted until the platform capitulated. Notably, Trump Media Group, the parent company of Truth Social, sued de Moraes, accusing him of issuing orders that “require censorship of lawful content within the United States, conflicting with Plaintiffs’ First Amendment and statutory rights.”

And the Trump administration has made no secret of its disdain for the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes various requirements on tech platforms. The administration’s efforts to pressure Europe on social media regulation as leverage in its trade negotiations with the bloc are well covered. Describing the DSA as a tax or tariff helps both American platforms and the Trump administration, which can argue that its own tariffs against the EU are, in part, retaliation for the treatment of US tech companies.

However, the visa threat also appears to be tied to broader goals, including defending what the administration regards as Western and Christian values. Read through this lens, it is also another signal to far-right movements that the administration is acting in their interests.

Rubio’s announcement came a day after a post on a Substack blog operated by the State Department titled “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe.” Authored by Samuel Samson, a senior advisor for the State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), it claims the promise of the European Union “lies in tatters” and that “Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.” It bemoans a German domestic security agency’s recent designation of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as an extremist organization, and calls the ban on French far-right politician and convicted embezzler Marine Le Pen’s eligibility for office a departure from “standard procedure.” (Jean-Baptiste Thierry, professor of law at the Université de Lorraine, told Euronews that the enforcement of ineligibility came with a “lengthy statement of reasons” based on LePen’s “particularly serious acts” and her “denial of the importance of the offence for which she was convicted.")

Answer me these questions three

While the order may be intentionally vague to ensure it can be applied in an arbitrary manner, it raises important questions for consideration. Tech Policy Press spoke to two experts to help map such questions and the potential implications of possible answers:

• David Kaye, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and
• Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.

1. What does the State Department regard as “censorship” of Americans?

Rubio’s announcement is short on definitions, but any visa restrictions will ultimately hinge on what the State Department deems as censorship.

“There are a million different problems with this policy,” said Kaye. “But the main one is that, because it doesn't define its key term, it's completely open-ended and gives vast discretion to this administration to decide what's actionable and what's not.”

Keller suspects the answer may be a simple one. “Censorship is suppression of speech that they like,” she said.

But the lack of a definition may make it difficult for foreign officials to gauge what might put them into conflict with the State Department, said Kaye. “Nobody on the other side of the pond is going to have any idea what is potentially getting them in trouble, apart from taking action against AfD or Tommy Robinson or something like that.”

2. What criteria will the State Department use to determine who is “responsible” for censorship?

Since the announcement contains no guidance on what types of officials may be deemed “responsible” for “censorship,” this determination may also be arbitrary. But will it apply only to senior officials, such as EU Commission officials or Brazilian justices? Or will it somehow apply to any mid-level manager at OfCom who wants to take a quick trip to Vegas or attend a conference focused on social media content moderation, like TrustCon? Could it extend to other types of organizations designated by governments, such as the “trusted flaggers” operating under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA)?

“Any of those people now need to ask themselves if they can even travel here. And there aren't any answers,” said Keller.

3. How might the threat of visa restrictions influence the behavior of foreign governments with regard to digital regulation, or beyond?

While it is clear that the Trump administration is engaged in a multipronged campaign to defang foreign regulators and create incentives against content moderation, what is less clear is whether it will work, or whether it may even backfire.

In at least one instance since the announcement, it appears that commentators are already looking for any sign that decisions taken by foreign officials may have anything to do with the State Department announcement. According to the Brazilian news site Globo, supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro hailed Rubio’s announcement and saw it as a threat against Justice de Moraes. Brazil is in the middle of a trial concerning its intermediary liability law, the Marco da Civil, that could open the door to more stringent regulation of social media. The report in Globo noted that the (previously scheduled) resumption of the trial was unhindered by the State Department’s announcement, but that it gained “additional symbolism” following it.

Kaye suggested that the additional scrutiny that mounting US pressure could put on foreign officials could cause them to act more aggressively, rather than pulling their punches:

It actually puts pressure in a funny way on Brussels to double down on enforcement. You could imagine a situation where there's no pressure and the Commission decides they're not going to take robust action against a platform for one reason or another, whatever it is. But now, if they don't take action against a platform, people are going to think it's because of this intimidation by the Trump administration. So paradoxically, this doesn't move Brussels to refrain from acting. It makes it more likely that they will act against platforms.

There may also be circumstances where the signal that the State Department is sending with its visa restrictions announcement could factor into other considerations beyond the domain of platform regulators, said Keller, particularly when it comes to the EU. “Ultimately, somebody really, really, really high up is going to make some calculated trade-offs between enforcing digital regulations and national security, or they're going to make a trade-off that's about enforcing these regulations versus their economy and tariffs,” she said.

Motivations upon motivations

It’s easy to see Rubio’s announcement as a simultaneous gesture to the interests of Big Tech figures such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who have made no secret of their disdain for foreign regulations on social media; to the “censorship” obsessed MAGA base that has been whipped into a frenzy on these issues since final days of the 2020 election; and to a global far-right movement that the State Department appears to want to encourage.

For instance, Tech Policy Press readers may recall Mark Zuckerberg’s January 7, 2025, announcement about changes to content moderation policies on Meta’s platforms, in which he expressed his intention to collaborate with the Trump administration to discourage social media regulations abroad, including in Europe and Latin America.

Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They're going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.

There is an additional geopolitical angle to the announcement worth considering—the Trump administration's seeming determination to replace traditional transatlantic alliances with an international entente between far-right governments. The MAGA movement’s fascination with Hungary is an oft-cited example; President Donald Trump is reportedly considering moving US troops from Germany to Hungary. But specific mentions of the AfD by the State Department in its visa restrictions announcement, alongside Vice President JD Vance’s criticism of the handling of the Romanian election during his recent speech in Munich, suggest a broader intention to support factions with similar ambitions across Europe.

So, who will be the first foreign official to face a visa restriction on the grounds described in Rubio’s announcement? It likely won’t be Henna Virkunnen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, who just returned from a trip to the US for high-level meetings in San Francisco and Washington, DC, earlier this month. In DC, her itinerary included meetings with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and an architect of the MAGA movement’s obsession with “censorship,” as well as Brendan Carr, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, and Andrew Ferguson, Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, both of whom are leading congruent efforts to take on what they deem the “censorship cartel.” She also met with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Whatever the subject of those conversations, on the same day that the State Department posted the threat of visa restrictions, Virkunnen told the news site Euractiv that American tech platforms are, simply by virtue of delivering on their stated policies and terms of service, far more censorious than Europe. “Often in the US, platforms have more strict rules with content,” Virkkunen said. She pointed to data from the platforms obtained under the DSA’s transparency mandates that indicate takedowns of material identified under the trusted flaggers program account for 1% of content removals. It appears unlikely, however, that the State Department will allow inconvenient facts to get in the way of a narrative that serves its political and ideological goals.