Trump’s State Department Wants to Use Tech Policy to Remake Europe In Its Image

Dean Jackson is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press.

The Trump administration appears to be engaged in a dramatic project to replace the United States’ traditional alliances with European nations, including through efforts to support ideological allies on the continent’s far-right. Tech policy and culture wars over content moderation on social media platforms are key to the effort.

This project is proceeding often in oblique ways. For instance: the US State Department is seemingly obsessed with Europe’s Digital Services Act, or DSA. The DSA regulates technology companies, particularly online platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube and TikTok. Under that law, platforms must submit regular transparency reports, partake in risk audits and act quickly to remove illegal content. Proponents of the law say it contains reasonable safeguards for free expression and that content moderation is essential to maintain a digital public square in which people feel safe enough to speak freely. Opponents, particularly right-wing figures, accuse the DSA of enabling government censorship.

This debate has entangled the DSA within trade disputes between the US and the European Union, but the State Department’s fixation runs deeper than mercantilism. While social media companies have been eager to collaborate with the US government to roll back foreign regulations, officials at the State Department are currently working to redefine transatlantic relations. Their aspiration appears to be a Europe united under far-right rule, which treats liberalism as a common enemy and casts aside the rules-based international order that brought the continent eight decades of relative peace. Tech policy has become a blunt instrument toward that larger goal.

Redefining Transatlanticism

If President Donald Trump’s first administration shook the US-EU relationship, his second administration might obliterate it. I spoke to four former State Department staff and senior officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, to better understand the rationale behind the administration's hostility to the DSA and its adversarial posture toward the EU.

One source, a former contractor with the Bureau of Democracy, Rights and Labor (DRL), said that the new administration shifted the Bureau’s traditional work on elections and human rights immediately upon taking office. “As soon as the [administration] came in, everything became, ‘we're… going to be looking at Western Europe and we're only going to be looking at Western Europe.’” When staff asked about more egregious violations of expression rights in countries including Russia, China, Turkey, Belarus, or Serbia, a former DRL staffer explained, they were told that those were not the new administration’s priorities. Reflecting the Department’s change in priorities, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has proposed a reorganization would create a new Deputy Assistant Secretary for “Democracy and Western Values” while diminishing staff and resources for DRL and its broader human rights mandate.
Asked for comment on this story, a State Department spokesperson said in a statement that “Free speech is a core American and Western value that the United States will defend vigorously, against intrusion from both allies and adversaries,” adding that the president and vice president have noted a “concerning” trend in Europe around free expression.

One of the people driving this shift in State Department priorities is Sam Samson, a 2021 college graduate who serves as a senior advisor to the department. On May 21, DRL responded to a congressional inquiry from Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asking how it defined “Western values.” The answer, penned by Samson and reviewed by Tech Policy Press, reads:

It is the moral and ethical framework underlying America’s Founding, rooted in an intellectual and cultural tradition spanning from Athens and Rome, through Christianity, to English common law, into America’s founding documents. It champions natural law, virtue ethics, the primacy of the family, national sovereignty, religious faith, and political freedom. It recognizes objective good and evil, and affirms that all human beings are made in the Image of God, possessing free will and certain unalienable rights. It is the duty of government to preserve these rights and freedoms.

Samson’s personal views appear to go farther, people who interacted with him at State said. A former senior State Department official described Samson’s ideology as a sort of “ordered liberty,” reflected in a 2021 essay he wrote for the American Conservative magazine. Writing in the context of opposition to critical race theory, Samson called for the right to “make room for order and limitation within its conception of freedom.” In other words, he is essentially proposing to redefine freedom so that it allows the state to quash disfavored points of view, in favor of what Samson calls the pursuit of the “transcendent good” — ranging “from basic nutrition to knowledge, family life, and ultimately to God, who is goodness itself.”

This worldview makes Samson an easy ally of Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism (Samson’s own religion) who describes himself as a member of the “postliberal right.” Vance’s talking points often mirror a conservative nonprofit called the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Samson has also seemingly been informed by ADF’s work, according to two of the sources formerly at the State Department, who said they were tasked with investigating instances of censorship alleged by ADF. “We had many exchanges over many of these cases, sort of burrowing into the details of, well, what exactly happened in this case?” said one official.

The results were often more complicated, failing to demonstrate a straightforward case of state censorship. One case publicly raised by ADF and Vance, for instance, involved a man who was praying in front of an abortion clinic in violation of a Scottish law creating “safe access zones” in front of such facilities. (One person who worked with Samson described him as “obsessed” with safe access zones.) Vance and ADF denounced the man’s conviction for, as ADF put it, “silently praying near an abortion facility.” But in actuality, a “community officer” talked to the man for an hour and forty minutes before fining him one hundred pounds for violating the safe access law. He did not pay the fine, and so was given “a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay prosecution costs.”

The vice president’s office asked officials to find examples of EU censorship. They struggled.

The individuals formerly affiliated with DRL also said that during a meeting at the White House in March, Vance’s office tasked the Department with finding examples of European censorship. DRL staff searched public sources, including the mandatory transparency reports platforms are required to file under the DSA. “That was pretty much our only job for quite a few weeks,” said one person involved in the effort. But the free expression team was unable to find clear examples of user speech which was removed for reasons other than violating platform terms of service or national law.

As a next step in this evidence-gathering gambit, they reached out to the platforms directly, but former staffers from DRL’s free expression team said they were only able to meet with representatives from X; Google and Meta canceled previously scheduled meetings. Staff felt the cancellation was unusual; these were corporate contacts with which they met regularly. Those meetings were not rescheduled before layoffs at the Department hit DRL.

The White House referred an inquiry to the State Department, which did not comment on the extent of their or the vice president’s involvement in State’s Europe efforts.

In a statement to Tech Policy Press, a Meta spokesperson said that the company “continues to engage with the current Administration and relevant federal agencies, including the State Department, to address concerns regarding the DSA, [Digital Markets Act], and other regulations from foreign governments.” Google and X did not respond to requests for comment.

According to the three former DRL personnel, X provided the team with less than a dozen examples of content which the company removed at the behest of European authorities. One particularly egregious example described by two of the sources was a political cartoon portraying a Muslim man sexually assaulting a child on an altar labeled “multiculturalism.” Other examples appeared to violate national laws against portrayal of grievous bodily harm. A few examples from Germany included explicit Nazi imagery — illegal under German law — shared by Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right political party. X presented this as their best evidence — a supposed smoking gun bearing the fingerprints of European censors.

Shortly after the meeting with X, DSA policy work was moved under the direct review of Samson and another official, Darren Beattie, the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Beattie’s professional experience includes being fired from the first Trump administration in 2018 after reporting revealed he was a speaker at a conference for white nationalists.

Remaking US foreign policy through closures, restrictions and reprisals

Less than three months into the new administration, the crusade against European social media regulation fully eclipsed previous efforts to combat foreign influence over tech companies. On April 16, Secretary Rubio announced the closure of the State Department’s center for “Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” which was formed to combat propaganda from authoritarian states and terrorist organizations outside the United States and to enhance US strategic communications abroad.

Rubio paired the official press release about R/FIMI’s closure with an essay in The Federalist titled “To Protect Free Speech, The Censorship-Industrial Complex Must Be Dismantled.” The essay borrowed the language of figures including Michael Shellenberger, whose writing on the Twitter Files popularized (and may have coined) the term Censorship-Industrial complex. After his announcement, Rubio sat for an interview with Mike Benz, a conservative digital influencer who previously published under the pseudonym Frame Game and who, like Beattie, has a history of connections to white nationalists. Benz asked the secretary if there were “any efforts underway to be able to have a kind of GEC files, as there were for the Twitter Files?” Rubio responded that Beattie would be involved in an effort to “document what happened.”

One former senior official close to the GEC’s work said they were “taken by surprise” by the Secretary’s essay. “I did not expect R/FIMI to close,” they said, because earlier discussions had raised the issue as a mere policy review by Beattie. In the end, the official concluded that the review “was all groundwork for political retaliation.”

In their statement, the State Department spokesperson called R/FIMI a “Biden-Era censorship apparatus” and said its closure “included a formal review and notification to Congress.”

R/FIMI was formed in December after the closure of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which opened in 2016 during the Obama administration and operated throughout the first Trump administration.

Reporting from the MIT Technology Review supports the argument that the policy review leading to R/FIMI’s closure was politically motivated, claiming that in March, Beattie circulated a document demanding all communications between R/FIMI employees and external figures and organizations like “Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory,” as well as “Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.” Some of the individuals mentioned by the document called it an “enemies list,” while other observers warned of a “witch hunt” within the State Department. (DiResta serves on Tech Policy Press’s board.)

The stakes of a potential ‘GEC files’ are high for those individuals, but for former GEC partners living under authoritarian rule abroad, they could be life or death. In a September 18 letter to Rubio, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) wrote:

We hope you agree that employees of the Department should not be “doxed” because they performed the duties required by their job description. We also ask that you take similar measures to protect former GEC implementing partners, many of whom are based in authoritarian countries where they took great risk to undertake work outlined in accordance with their grants. Individuals in countries without free speech or fair judicial processes who are exposed through the publication of unredacted communications would be vulnerable to political targeting, potential jailtime, torture and perhaps even extrajudicial killings.

Another radical policy change quickly followed R/FIMI’s closure. On May 28, the State Department announced that it would refuse visas to officials “responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” as well as to their families. (While Europe would seem to have been the inspiration for this policy, its first publicly known use was against members of the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court.)

Former State Department staff said that this idea had been percolating since at least February and was also discussed at the March meeting at the White House with the Office of the Vice President. The purpose of the meeting was ostensibly to discuss how to hold the EU accountable for its enforcement of the DSA. At a later meeting, officials discussed another idea: to use export controls to retaliate against content takedowns required by the DSA. In this scheme, a tool designed for control of physical goods would instead treat speech as an export, allowing platforms to request that the US government step in, claim authority over the disputed content, and refuse to remove it. “That’s now how export controls are used…. Export controls are usually on [physical] products,” said one former official, adding that “it positions the US government to be in a content moderation role, which under another name is called censorship.”

On May 27, the day before its announcement of the visa restrictions, the State Department foreshadowed the change in a Substack essay by Samson on “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe.” In it, Samson writes that:

Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.

The piece goes on to repeat previous examples of alleged suppression, including ADF’s misleading account of safe access zones outside abortion clinics.

Toward a far-right international

Rather than viewing tech companies as the primary proponents of the State Department’s transformed free expression policy, the officials I spoke to described a relationship of convenience. Silicon Valley, they say, is a willing participant in the government’s efforts to topple or defang the DSA, even if the right’s true aims are more ambitious.

One of the former senior officials said they did not expect the fallout from Elon Musk and President Trump’s spectacular break-up to change the trajectory of the State Department’s efforts. The officials involved "firmly believe the Europeans need to be… sanctioned in some way for fining American companies on the basis of US law on speech. And you need to be very clear, it’s US law that they’re looking at, not European law and not international human rights law… there is no international legal basis to sanction the Europeans,” said the official.

The Trump administration’s ambitions have little to do with safeguarding free expression from tyranny. If they did, the administration would not be searching for cherry-picked examples of content removed under the DSA. Instead, they are using tech policy at the State Department as a tool in their project to reshape the post-war international order in Trump’s image — at the expense of the transatlantic alliance and, potentially, the lives and liberties of activists in authoritarian settings who formerly accepted grants from the US government.

Correction: This article previously referred to the German political party known as AfD incorrectly as the Allianz für Deutschland. It is the Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany.