US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that he will be issuing visa bans on foreign officials whom he deems complicit in censoring Americans on social media networks.

“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,” said Rubio.

It’s not clear what the new policy will entail. Rubio did not cite any specific acts of censorship, nor did he single out any foreign officials as being responsible for stripping Americans of their freedom of speech online.

We do know, however, that the administration has aimed most of its criticism of foreign censorship at the European Union, arguing that its hate speech rules risk curbing legitimate political debates.

While this is a sensible issue to raise, one wonders how seriously the world can take the Trump administration when it has been engaged in its own form of speech crackdowns here at home. From cancelling the visas and green cards of foreign-born residents who vocally oppose the war in Gaza to ordering civil rights investigations of universities with ongoing protests, the administration has, if anything, been embracing European-style hate speech regulations here at home.

There’s also the issue of practicality. Even if the administration wasn’t losing credibility on the free speech issue, it would still be difficult for America to take a consistent approach to the censorship pursued by other countries against Americans. Would, for instance, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman be on the chopping block given his, well, chopping to pieces of a US-based journalist? India is one of the countries that sends the most requests to social media firms for takedowns of content. Would the Trump administration really risk visa bans on Indian officials, especially as it’s engaged in highly sensitive trade negotiations with the subcontinent?

To get serious about threats to freedom of speech from overseas officials, the administration would have to lay out consistent and objective standards: what constitutes a violation of freedom of speech, and what would trigger a visa ban? Once a ban is imposed, what does a foreign government have to do to get it lifted?

Answering these questions would help build a framework that could send a clear message to foreign officials who have failed to protect the free speech rights of digital users. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely that the administration will do this. Something that is clear from the public remarks of senior officials like Vice President J.D. Vance and Rubio is that they have developed a sort of obsession with European officials and their war on the far Right.

The State Department’s Substack, for instance, has made Germany in particular a whipping post, criticising the nation for the actions taken against the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the hard Right party that has been surging in the polls in recent months.

Should the Trump administration press ahead with its plan to impose visa bans, it risks confirming a widely held suspicion: that its defence of free speech is more ideological than principled. Based on its recent actions, the administration is evidently less concerned with free expression as a universal value and more interested in shielding Right-wing political movements — at home and abroad — from scrutiny and consequence.

By selectively targeting countries like Germany while overlooking or excusing censorship in allied autocracies, Trump is undermining America’s position as the free speech capital of the world. He should know better than anyone else: free speech is a fundamental right, not a partisan tool.

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Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, The Intercept, and the Center for American Progress.

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