Trump Bans Two Britons From US for Curbing Free Speech

The Trump administration has said it will deport Imran Ahmed, the Chief Executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, and ban from the US Thierry Breton, the pro-censorship former EU commissioner, along with another Briton for curbing free speech. The Telegraph has the story.

Imran Ahmed, the Chief Executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a group set up by Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, faces deportation and Clare Melford, who heads the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), will have her US visa revoked.

The State Department said it would also deny visas to three others, accusing them of seeking to “coerce” American social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose.

The measure targeted Thierry Breton, the former top tech regulator at the European Commission, who often clashed with tech tycoons such as Elon Musk over their obligations to follow EU rules.

“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organised efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, said as he announced the move.

Jean-Noel Barrot, the French Foreign Minister, said on X that his country “strongly condemns” the visa restrictions, adding that Europe “cannot let the rules governing their digital space be imposed by others upon them”.

Freedom of speech has emerged as a major fault line between Washington and Europe.

Donald Trump and his top team have frequently taken aim at what they see as attempts by outsiders to limit speech in the US, and to interfere in elections by determining what can and cannot be published online.

The DSA has become a bitter rallying point for US conservatives who see it as a weapon of censorship against Right-wing thought in Europe and beyond, an accusation the EU denies.. …

The CCDH, which has charitable status in the US, claims to “disrupt the spread of digital hate and misinformation”, with branches in the UK and the US.

It was set up in 2017 by Morgan McSweeney, now Number 10 chief of staff, initially to target online antisemitism.

Mr Ahmed is based in the group’s Washington office, but is understood to run the entire transnational operation from the US.

He has found himself in the crosshairs of some of the President’s closest allies, including Robert F Kennedy Jnr and Elon Musk.

In 2021, the group named Mr Kennedy, the current Health Secretary, as one of its “Disinformation Dozen”, a list of 12 people it claimed should have their accounts removed from social media for posting anti‑vaccine content.

Leaked documents, thought to have been drawn up by the CCDH, also reportedly listed “kill Musk’s Twitter” as one of the group’s annual priorities last year.

The non-profit published a series of highly critical reports linking Mr Musk’s takeover of the platform, now known as X, to rising misinformation and hate speech that was “spreading like wildfire”.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: In the wake of the Bondi Beach attack, the Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, has said the quiet part out loud in asserting that free speech must be curbed to preserve multiculturalism.

I acknowledge that we don’t have the same free speech rules that they have in the United States and I make no apologies for that, we have got a responsibility to knit together our community, that comes from different races and religions.

In other words (to say the even quieter part out loud), now we have societies with lots of Muslims, we have to clamp down on what people can say.