State Department Exiles Critics to “Protect” Free Speech

from the that’s-not-how-this-is-supposed-to-work dept

Last week, Marco Rubio and the State Department revoked visas for five Europeans—including Imran Ahmed, a legal permanent resident in the US married to a US citizen—because they don’t like their speech about disinformation. The State Department’s justification? This form of speech suppression is necessary to protect free speech.

This is merely the latest episode in what will go down as the most anti-free speech, censorial presidential administration in history. Remember when Trump’s first executive order claimed to “restore free speech and end federal censorship“? We’ve since seen the administration repeatedly attack and punish people for their speech, but the Rubio move takes the hypocrisy to a new level: using government power to punish people for their speech while claiming to fight censorship.

MSNOW asked me to write my take on this story, which was published over the weekend. As I noted, Rubio is using actual censorship to fight fake censorship.

The U.S. government just banned five people from entering the country because it doesn’t like their speech. This ban, according to the State Department, is necessary to protect free speech.

If that sounds insane to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension.

For the record: I’ve been a vocal critic of both Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate, which does ridiculously shoddy research (they once claimed photos of gum were “eating disorder content”), and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, about whom I’ve never said anything nice. But when the U.S. government bans people from the country for their speech, the quality of their work becomes irrelevant. Breton, admittedly, did try to abuse the law to censor Americans, but the EU spit him out and rejected such abuse immediately:

The most instructive case here is Breton himself. He did, in fact, try to abuse the DSA to suppress speech. In August 2024, he sent Elon Musk a threatening letter suggesting that Musk’s planned livestreamed interview with then-candidate Donald Trump could violate the DSA. It was a blatant attempt at censorship. 

And here’s what happened: The EU rejected him. Completely. EU officials went on record condemning the letter, his fellow commissioners distanced themselves from his threats, and within weeks he resigned to avoid being fired. As EU free speech experts noted in a recent open letter: “Politically, the EU’s checks and balances worked.”

So even when Breton actually tried to censor Americans, the EU’s institutions rejected it. Meanwhile, Rubio is retaliating against Breton for that failed attempt by exiling him from the country—actual government punishment for speech.

But the truly egregious bit of the State Department’s move here was that they had Under Secretary Sarah Rogers go on X and claim that these bans were necessary to prevent “Murthy-style speech suppression,” which is an incredible admission, given that the ruling in the Murthy case showed there was no actual evidence of speech suppression.

As I wrote in the piece, this is bizarre revisionist history of a ruling that just came out last year:

Rogers is referring to the Murthy v. Missouri case mentioned above, where two states and a collection of angry social media influencers sued the Biden administration, claiming social media platforms censored content at the government’s direction. The Supreme Court rejected those claims 6-3, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion finding the plaintiffs had no standing because there was no evidence the government suppressed anyone’s speech. The platforms, Barrett noted, were simply enforcing their own rules.

Even worse, in a damning footnote, Justice Barrett highlighted that the lower court’s finding that there was censorship was based on a “clearly erroneous” reading of the evidence.

So the State Department is citing a case that disproved government censorship as evidence of government censorship. That’s not even creative lying — it’s just citing your own loss as precedent.

As I wrote in that piece, this goes beyond routine lying. The State Department is weaponizing a Supreme Court case that explicitly rejected claims of government censorship to justify actual, unambiguous government effort at punishing people for their speech. They’re inverting the legal record—taking a ruling that said “no, the government didn’t suppress speech” and using it as precedent to suppress speech.

The State Department is literally using the judiciary’s rejection of censorship claims as permission to punish people for their speech. When an administration twists a loss into a win by doing exactly what the court said they didn’t do, we’re not just dealing with censorial hypocrites. We’re watching them test how far they can push before anyone stops them.

For what it’s worth Ahmed quickly went to court seeking a temporary restraining order on this decision, which he feared would be used to eject him from the country where he lives with his family. On Christmas day, the judge issued the TRO, with orders for a telephone conference later today to discuss further issues in the case.

Again, there are few things that Ahmed and I agree on (he’s spent months insisting that Section 230 needs to be repealed, based on his direct misrepresentation of 230). I think he’s wrong on a wide variety of issues, and that his advocacy is dangerous for speech and the open internet. But I’ll stand up and defend his right to say such things any day, without the US government punishing him for it.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, eu, free speech, imran ahmed, marco rubio, murthy v. missouri, sarah rogers, thierry breton

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