Exporting the Censorship Lie: America’s War on Global Internet Regulation
Why U.S. Leaders Are Targeting Allies to Shield Tech Platforms from Accountability
Stand up against autocratic attacks and click the ❤️ above to help Substack’s recommendation algorithm show this post to more people ☀️
Yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new visa restrictions on foreign nationals who have “taken flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.” He continues:
It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil. It is similarly unacceptable for foreign officials to 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.
This comes after Vice President JD Vance’s February speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he similarly scolded our European allies for implementing their own laws regulating the social media industry.
Ah, America: one-time leader of the free world, current pro bono lobbyist for the multi-billion dollar American social media industry.
How did we get here?
From the moment that Trump was elected with $270 million of Elon Musk’s fortune, social media magnates in America realized they had a choice: kiss the ring, or endure Trump-led litigation and regulation.
For tech, however, kissing the ring wasn’t simply an act of fealty; it was a shedding of a burden. In aligning themselves with Trump, social media companies were expected to drop their investments in fact-checking, content moderation, and trust and safety. To tech leaders, these efforts had been costly and scandal-prone. They were happy to wash their hands of them and adopt the Trump team’s baseless assertion that content moderation—and disinformation research—were censorship, full stop.
These pronouncements endanger fact-checkers, civil society organizations, and academics around the world who have been working to inform the public about how and why the information they see online makes its way to them. They also privilege the tools and tactics that Trump has used to get ahead—namely, the inflammatory, misleading rhetoric that drives enragement and engagement online.
But the tech executives didn’t care; their calculation was bigger than America’s domestic political future. In getting on the censorship bandwagon, they didn’t just escape regulation at home; as Rubio’s announcement shows, the Trump administration is working to help tech platforms avoid regulation abroad, too.
This is, as Carole Cadwalladr astutely observed, the broligarchy at work.
What’s in the announcement?
Rubio begins by congratulating himself for “rejecting censorship at home.” We’ve documented at length how the Trump administration, far from “rejecting censorship,” is engaging in a First Amendment assault the likes of which this country has never seen, all while obliterating the U.S. Government’s capacity to respond to foreign information threats.
Rubio goes on to describe how incensed he is that the speech of “U.S. citizens and residents” is allegedly being abrogated by scary foreign censors (he provides no evidence for this). The Secretary has apparently forgotten that he recently arrested Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, and revoked the student visas of over 1800 other students, for exercising the free speech rights afforded to them under the U.S. Constitution. According to Rubio, censorship against U.S. citizens and residents is only okay when the Trump Administration is doing the censoring. Got it.
Rubio also rails against foreign governments and institutions for attempting to implement laws regulating social media that they, as duly-elected representatives of their constituents, drafted and passed.
Which bodies and countries are likely to be targeted?
It seems pretty clear to me that Elon Musk’s personal gripes influenced this poorly-reasoned visa restriction. Among tech executives, he and his platform have clashed the most frequently with global online safety regulators. Other leaders and platforms mostly continue to quietly comply with local laws; Meta even touted the success of their fact-checking program in Australia before the recent Aussie parliamentary election. Musk is only a few degrees of separation from Acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, who has been leading the State Department’s anti-censorship crusade. In short, these visa restrictions were born from the addled brains of conspiracy theorists.
The thing about crying “censorship” when there isn’t any is that you can apply the label to anyone you like. This will be a useful provision to invoke against anyone critical of Trump. But there are a couple of entities and countries, in particular, that have gotten under Musk’s skin and may find themselves in Rubio and Beattie’s crosshairs:
European Union
Musk has openly attacked the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a set of rules that, among other goals, works to prevent illegal content online, combat the spread of disinformation, ensure transparency in advertising, and bolster researchers’ and policymakers’ ability to investigate platforms within the European Union single market. After a significant rise in hate speech, disinformation, threats, and other illegal content on X since Musk’s takeover, European regulators are weighing penalties against Musk and X. Among other issues, Musk and X have repeatedly failed to take action to address the spread of illegal content and information manipulation, including Russian propaganda. Moreover, X has also failed to provide researchers the access they are guaranteed by European law to research online harms taking place on the platform. Musk has falsely framed this oversight, conducted in accordance with European law, as censorship.
Germany
Musk has also attacked domestic legislation across Europe, and promoted accounts spreading hate speech and inciting violence. In Germany, where the standards of free speech are different than the US, as outlined in the German constitution, hate speech that harms one's reputation is illegal, as are “posts in which women are slandered and insulted in a sexualized manner, or publicly encouraged to send nude photos.” Despite Rubio’s—and JD Vance’s before him—faux outrage, there have been no reports of Americans being prosecuted under this legislation, in the US or Germany. German authorities have prosecuted users who made posts that “advocated rape or sexual assault or that distributed videos of torture or killing.” Is that censorship?
United Kingdom
The UK also interprets free speech differently than the US. It also recently began to implement the Online Safety Act, a landmark piece of legislation that works to protect children and adults online by making platforms “more responsible for their users’ safety” through regulation and fines and requiring the removal of illegal content (such as encouraging self-harm, cyberflashing, threats, and intimate image abuse).
Last summer, the Online Safety Act came under scrutiny in the aftermath of the Southport stabbing, in which three girls were killed by a radicalized assailant at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Far-right actors falsely claimed a Muslim asylum-seeker was the perpetrator, and this claim went viral. Musk himself actively spread racist, anti-immigrant content following the tragedy. Race riots followed, and at least 30 people were arrested for posts that incited violence. As the BBC’s Marianna Spring writes:
Elon Musk has accused law enforcement in the UK of trying to police opinions about issues such as immigration and there have been accusations that action taken against individuals posters has been disproportionate.
[The UK’s head of counter-terror policing, Assistant Commissioner Matt] Jukes responds: “I would say this to Elon Musk if he was here, we were not arresting people for having opinions on immigration. [Police] went and arrested people for threatening to, or inciting others to, burn down mosques or hotels.”
Australia
Musk has also attacked and attempted to undermine Australia’s eSafety Office and its Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. Australia’s Online Safety Act follows an interesting model, encouraging compliance through both transparency notices and takedown requests. Using the law, the eSafety Commissioner can issue notices “‘requiring online service providers to report on their compliance with the [Basic Online Safety] Expectations,’” publish providers’ responses to such requests, and issue fines to those who are found to not be in compliance.” In 2023, Inman Grant—herself an American citizen and former Twitter, Adobe, and Microsoft executive—“issued two such transparency notices relating to child sexual abuse material and online hate to X. In both cases, she found the platform to be in non-compliance. [...] Inman Grant issued a notice to the platform and fined it 610,500 AUD (about 412,000 USD).”
Inman Grant’s execution of her duties made her a target for Musk. Following a livestreamed stabbing of a bishop in Wakeley, she issued a takedown request in accordance with Australian law to platforms hosting videos of the stabbing. Meta complied immediately; Musk and X refused to do so, despite the fact that the content likely violated X’s own policies. Musk levied a series of attacks against Inman Grant; she faced a deluge of online abuse as a result. Eventually, eSafety “discontinued its legal action on the Wakeley stabbing against [Musk and X] in Australia’s Federal Court to focus on other litigation, including matters involving X Corp.” In other words, Australia remains a regulatory adversary for Musk, and by extension, the US Government.
Brazil
Musk also personally attacked Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, in addition to the Brazilian Judiciary, after he was ordered to remove several accounts responsible for spreading disinformation about the validity of Brazil’s 2022 election, in accordance with Brazilian law. Musk closed X’s Brazil office, further violating Brazilian law, which states that platforms must have representatives on the ground. When X did not comply with Moraes’s ruling, the platform was blocked in Brazil for 40 days. Musk eventually caved, removing the content, reestablishing X’s Brazil office, paying a $5M fine, and walking away with his tail between his legs.
But Moraes didn’t stop at X; he recently ordered video streaming platform Rumble to block a right-wing Brazilian blogger’s account and establish an office in Brazil; Rumble did not comply with Moraes’s order. It, too, was blocked in Brazil, and attempted to file emergency motions in American courts to avoid complying with the Brazilian court’s rulings. These actions have not made Moraes popular with the Trump Administration. Rubio and others are calling for sanctions, criminal actions, and visa bans against him, perhaps because they’re scared that his winning playbook will be replicated beyond Brazil.
In short, yes, sovereign nations have been enforcing their laws. So far, those regulations have only impacted one American: Elon Musk.
What are the implications?
Rubio ends his announcement by writing “we will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty.” What about the sovereignty of the nations being targeted, all America’s close allies?
My friend and colleague Lou Osborn, an author and member of online investigative collective All Eyes On Wagner, wrote on LinkedIn that she is “outraged” at Rubio’s announcement. “With our children and populations using U.S. social media platforms, it is a public interest and a state security matter to be able to call out platforms like X or Meta [...], understand their algorithms and expose inauthentic campaigns.”
Lou is right. These platforms may be headquartered in the United States, but the internet is global, and governments sometimes need to act to safeguard citizens from its global harms. Earlier this year, as the perpetrator of the Southport stabbing faced trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he searched for video of the Wakeley incident—which Musk declined to remove—just six minutes before leaving his home to murder three girls under the age of ten.
Rubio and Musk have grossly misrepresented the actions that our allies have taken to safeguard democratic discourse and public safety, hypercharging the censorship lie in its fourth feverish year. They’ve done so with the goal of scoring political points and consolidating their own power over the internet—and by extension, the very fabric of our democracy.
Rubio’s announcement may seem inconsequential as we head into the fifth month of the permacrisis—a few foreigners don’t get visas, who cares?—but don’t be fooled: this is part of a broader plan to remake not just America, but the world, in a Trumpian image.