As most of the country wound down for Christmas, the Trump administration had other ideas. On Tuesday night, the State Department announced sanctions against five Europeans. The charge? Not corruption, terrorism or espionage. Instead, it was crimes against freedom of speech.
After Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced the sanctions, Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, followed up with details of the five individuals, who include the former European commissioner, Thierry Breton, and two British citizens, Imran Ahmed and Clare Melford.
She said Ahmed, head of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, and Melford, chief executive of the Global Disinformation Index, were guilty of “extraterritorial censorship of Americans”. “Our message is clear,” she said: “if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”
