The US travel bans are not about free speech. They're about sovereignty in the age of platform power

Most of Europe's information infrastructure is American-controlled. The risks are becoming harder to ignore.

Earlier this week, the U.S. government announced visa bans against several individuals involved in European digital regulation and anti-disinformation work, including Thierry Breton, the former European Commissioner. The stated justification: these actors were allegedly involved in censoring American speech.

The work that appears to have triggered the U.S. concerns platform governance, market power, and transparency obligations, not the policing of individual opinions expressed by American citizens. One can hold serious reservations about European digital regulation, including the Digital Services Act, and still recognize that this is not an effort to silence U.S. voices.

European digital regulation is, at its core, an attempt to limit concentrated private power over information flows, markets, and public discourse. I think that is a legitimate political objective, even if reasonable people disagree on how it is pursued, or whether current regulatory tools are well designed to achieve it.

Collapsing this struggle into a story about “censorship” is a political instrument. It allows efforts to constrain corporate dominance to be reframed as attacks on free expression itself and turns any attempt to regulate platforms into a free-speech controversy by default.

Being barred from traveling to the United States is inconvenient, perhaps insulting, but hardly existential. The trajectory is what matters: rhetorical pressure in Munich, symbolic sanctions now, and perhaps next, leverage over the infrastructure that underpins the global information ecosystem.

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Whose disinformation is it, anyway?

Before we get into the infrastructure concerns, let’s do the world’s longest disclaimer: I’m not a neutral observer in this debate, even less so than usual.

I co-founded Hungary’s first dedicated anti-disinformation newsroom and served on the executive board of the European Digital Media Observatory. I’ve been part of this ecosystem for years, and I remain proud of a lot of the work it has produced.

At the same time, I’ve grown uneasy with how “disinformation” functions as an explanatory frame, especially when it becomes a moral shortcut rather than an analytical tool.

There are contexts where the concept is essential. Foreign information manipulation, state-backed propaganda, coordinated intimidation campaigns: these are real phenomena with real consequences. In Hungary, a centralized government propaganda machine has long been used to smear and drown out independent voices. Platform dynamics matter too: algorithmic amplification and monetization incentives routinely magnify harm.

But “disinformation” is too often used to explain political disagreement itself. People who hold different views are treated as either malicious actors or passive victims: misled, deceived, manipulated. Even if sometimes true, political conflict is not reducible to epistemic failure.

For these reasons, I increasingly find frameworks that focus on behavior rather than belief more useful. Platforms have moved in this direction, emphasizing inauthentic behavior, impersonation, coordinated networks, because these are easier to identify and justify acting against without adjudicating contested truths. The related concept of “digital deception,” as advanced by Indicator and others, is narrower, more operational, and avoids turning epistemology into a proxy for morality.

None of this invalidates anti-disinformation work. But it argues for more humility, sharper tools and fewer totalizing narratives.

We are all dependent on US infrastructure

Now, back to US restrictions. If the visa bans were simply about punishing a handful of individuals, they would not be worth much attention. Those affected will be fine. But the bans recast participation in European digital governance, especially when it constrains American corporate power, as hostile activity, lowering the threshold for escalation.

Payments, hosting, cloud services, analytics, advertising technology, and distribution platforms, the critical pipelines of the digital information ecosystem, are overwhelmingly controlled by U.S. companies operating under U.S. jurisdiction.

Take Stripe as a simple example. It is an excellent product. We recommend it regularly to clients because it is easy to implement, reliable, and user-friendly. It underpins a significant share of online payments for media outlets and nonprofits across Europe.

In a world shaped by sanctions, compliance regimes, and geopolitical retaliation, the step from symbolic measures to infrastructural leverage is no longer unthinkable. Imagine a scenario, in which certain European organizations are no longer allowed to use American payment infrastructure. Not because they broke the law, but because their work is deemed politically unacceptable or strategically inconvenient.