It was early evening in Berlin, just a day before Christmas Eve, when Josephine Ballon got an unexpected email from US Customs and Border Protection. The status of her ability to travel to the United States had changed—she’d no longer be able to enter the country.
At first, she couldn’t find any information online as to why, though she had her suspicions. She was one of the directors of HateAid, a small German nonprofit founded to support the victims of online harassment and violence. As the organization has become a strong advocate of EU tech regulations, it has increasingly found itself attacked in campaigns from right-wing politicians and provocateurs who claim that it engages in censorship.
It was only later that she saw what US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had posted on X:
Rubio was promoting a conspiracy theory about what he has called the “censorship-industrial complex,” which alleges widespread collusion between the US government, tech companies, and civil society organizations to silence conservative voices—the very conspiracy theory HateAid has recently been caught up in.
Then Undersecretary of State Sarah B. Rogers posted on X the names of the individuals targeted by travel bans. The list included Ballon, as well as her HateAid co-director, Anna Lena von Hodenberg. Also named were three others doing similar or related work: former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, who had helped author Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA); Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which documents hate speech on social media platforms; and Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, which provides risk ratings warning advertisers about placing ads on websites promoting hate speech and disinformation.
It was an escalation in the Trump administration’s war on digital rights—fought in the name of free speech. But EU officials, freedom of speech experts, and the five individuals targeted all flatly reject the accusations of censorship. Ballon, von Hodenberg, and some of their clients tell me that their work is fundamentally about making people feel safer online. And their experiences over the past few weeks show just how politicized and besieged their work in online safety has become. They almost certainly won’t be the last people targeted in this way.
Ballon was the one to tell von Hodenberg that both their names were on the list. “We kind of felt a chill in our bones,” von Hodenberg told me when I caught up with the pair in early January.
But she added that they also quickly realized, “Okay, it’s the old playbook to silence us.” So they got to work—starting with challenging the narrative the US government was pushing about them.
Within a few hours, Ballon and von Hodenberg had issued a strongly worded statement refuting the allegations: “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression,” they wrote. “We demand a clear signal from the German government and the European Commission that this is unacceptable. Otherwise, no civil society organisation, no politician, no researcher, and certainly no individual will dare to denounce abuses by US tech companies in the future.”
Those signals came swiftly. On X, Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, called the entry bans “not acceptable,” adding that “the DSA was democratically adopted by the EU, for the EU—it does not have extraterritorial effect.” Also on X, French president Emmanuel Macron wrote that “these measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.” The European Commission issued a statement that it “strongly condemns” the Trump administration’s actions and reaffirmed its “sovereign right to regulate economic activity in line with our democratic values.”
Ahmed, Melford, Breton, and their respective organizations also made their own statements denouncing the entry bans. Ahmed, the only one of the five based in the United States, also successfully filed suit to preempt any attempts to detain him, which the State Department had indicated it would consider doing.
But alongside the statements of solidarity, Ballon and von Hodenberg said, they also received more practical advice: Assume the travel ban was just the start and that more consequences could be coming. Service providers might preemptively revoke access to their online accounts; banks might restrict their access to money or the global payment system; they might see malicious attempts to get hold of their personal data or that of their clients. Perhaps, allies told them, they should even consider moving their money into friends’ accounts or keeping cash on hand so that they could pay their team’s salaries—and buy their families’ groceries.
These warnings felt particularly urgent given that just days before, the Trump administration had sanctioned two International Criminal Court judges for “illegitimate targeting of Israel.” As a result, they had lost access to many American tech platforms, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Gmail.
“If Microsoft does that to someone who is a lot more important than we are,” Ballon told me, “they will not even blink to shut down the email accounts from some random human rights organization in Germany.”
“We have now this dark cloud over us that any minute, something can happen,” von Hodenberg added. “We’re running against time to take the appropriate measures.”
Helping navigate “a lawless place”
Founded in 2018 to support people experiencing digital violence, HateAid has since evolved to defend digital rights more broadly. It provides ways for people to report illegal online content and offers victims advice, digital security, emotional support, and help with evidence preservation. It also educates German police, prosecutors, and politicians about how to handle online hate crimes.
Once the group is contacted for help, and if its lawyers determine that the type of harassment has likely violated the law, the organization connects victims with legal counsel who can help them file civil and criminal lawsuits against perpetrators, and if necessary, helps finance the cases. (HateAid itself does not file cases against individuals.) Ballon and von Hodenberg estimate that HateAid has worked with around 7,500 victims and helped them file 700 criminal cases and 300 civil cases, mostly against individual offenders.
For 23-year-old German law student and outspoken political activist Theresia Crone, HateAid’s support has meant that she has been able to regain some sense of agency in her life, both on and offline. She had reached out after she discovered entire online forums dedicated to making deepfakes of her. Without HateAid, she told me, “I would have had to either put my faith into the police and the public prosecutor to prosecute this properly, or I would have had to foot the bill of an attorney myself”—a huge financial burden for “a student with basically no fixed income.”
In addition, working alone would have been retraumatizing: “I would have had to document everything by myself,” she said—meaning “I would have had to see all of these pictures again and again.”
“The internet is a lawless place,” Ballon told me when we first spoke, back in mid-December, a few weeks before the travel ban was announced. In a conference room at the HateAid office in Berlin, she said there are many cases that “cannot even be prosecuted, because no perpetrator is identified.” That’s why the nonprofit also advocates for better laws and regulations governing technology companies in Germany and across the European Union.
On occasion, they have also engaged in strategic litigation against the platforms themselves. In 2023, for example, HateAid and the European Union of Jewish Students sued X for failing to enforce its terms of service against posts that were antisemitic or that denied the Holocaust, which is illegal in Germany.
This almost certainly put the organization in the crosshairs of X owner Elon Musk; it also made HateAid a frequent target of Germany’s far right party, the Alliance for Democracy, which Musk has called “the only hope for Germany.” (X did not respond to a request to comment on this lawsuit.)
HateAid gets caught in Trump World’s dragnet
For better and worse, HateAid’s profile grew further when it took on another critical job in online safety. In June 2024, it was named as a trusted flagger organization under the Digital Services Act, a 2022 EU law that requires social media companies to remove certain content (including hate speech and violence) that violates national laws, and to provide more transparency to the public, in part by allowing more appeals on platforms’ moderation decisions.
Trusted flaggers are entities designated by individual EU countries to point out illegal content, and they are a key part of DSA enforcement. While anyone can report such content, trusted flaggers’ reports are prioritized and legally require a response from the platforms.
The Trump administration has loudly argued that the trusted flagger program and the DSA more broadly are examples of censorship that disproportionately affect voices on the right and American technology companies, like X.
When we first spoke in December, Ballon said these claims of censorship simply don’t hold water: “We don’t delete content, and we also don’t, like, flag content publicly for everyone to see and to shame people. The only thing that we do: We use the same notification channels that everyone can use, and the only thing that is in the Digital Services Act is that platforms should prioritize our reporting.” Then it is on the platforms to decide what to do.
Nevertheless, the idea that HateAid and like-minded organizations are censoring the right has become a powerful conspiracy theory with real-world consequences. (Last year, MIT Technology Review covered the closure of a small State Department office following allegations that it had conducted “censorship,” as well as an unusual attempt by State leadership to access internal records related to supposed censorship—including information about two of the people who have now been banned, Medford and Ahmed, and both of their organizations.)
HateAid saw a fresh wave of harassment starting last February, when 60 Minutes aired a documentary on hate speech laws in Germany; it featured a quote from Ballon that “free speech needs boundaries,” which, she added, “are part of our constitution.” The interview happened to air just days before Vice President JD Vance attended the Munich Security Conference; there he warned that “across Europe, free speech … is in retreat.” This, Ballon told me, led to heightened hostility toward her and her organization.
Fast-forward to July, when a report by Republicans in the US House of Representatives claimed that the DSA “compels censorship and infringes on American free speech.” HateAid was explicitly named in the report.
All of this has made its work “more dangerous,” Ballon told me in December. Before the 60 Minutes interview, “maybe one and a half years ago, as an organization, there were attacks against us, but mostly against our clients, because they were the activists, the journalists, the politicians at the forefront. But now … we see them becoming more personal.”
As a result, over the last year, HateAid has taken more steps to protect its reputation and get ahead of the damaging narratives. Ballon has reported the hate speech targeted at her—“More [complaints] than in all the years I did this job before,” she said—as well as defamation lawsuits on behalf of HateAid.
All these tensions finally came to a head in December. At the start of the month, the European Commission fined X $140 million for DSA violations. This set off yet another round of recriminations about supposed censorship of the right, with Trump calling the fine “a nasty one” and warning: “Europe has to be very careful.”
Just a few weeks later, the day before Christmas Eve, retaliation against individuals finally arrived.
Who gets to define—and experience—free speech
Digital rights groups are pushing back against the Trump administration’s narrow view of what constitutes free speech and censorship.
“What we see from this administration is a conception of freedom of expression that is not a human-rights-based conception where this is an inalienable, indelible right that’s held by every person,” says David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based digital rights group. Rather, he sees an “expectation that… [if] anybody else’s speech is challenged, there’s a good reason for it, but it should never happen to them.”
Since Trump won his second term, social media platforms have walked back their commitments to trust and safety. Meta, for example, ended fact-checking on Facebook and adopted much of the administration’s censorship language, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling the podcaster Joe Rogan that it would “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world” if they are seen as “going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
Have more information on this story or a tip for something else that we should report? Using a non-work device, reach the reporter on Signal at eileenguo.15 or [email protected].
And as the recent fines on X show, Musk’s platform has gone even further in flouting European law—and, ultimately, ignoring the user rights that the DSA was written to protect. In perhaps one of the most egregious examples yet, in recent weeks X allowed people to use Grok, its AI generator, to create nonconsensual nude images of women and children, with few limits—and, so far at least, few consequences. (Last week, X released a statement that it would start limiting users’ ability to create explicit images with Grok; in response to a number of questions, X representative Rosemarie Esposito pointed me to that statement.)
For Ballon, it makes perfect sense: “You can better make money if you don’t have to implement safety measures and don’t have to invest money in making your platform the safest place,” she told me.
“It goes both ways,” von Hodenberg added. “It’s not only the platforms who profit from the US administration undermining European laws … but also, obviously, the US administration also has a huge interest in not regulating the platforms … because who is amplified right now? It’s the extreme right.”
She believes this explains why HateAid—and Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate and Melford’s Global Disinformation Index, as well as Breton and the DSA—have been targeted: They are working to disrupt this “unholy deal where the platforms profit economically and the US administration is profiting in dividing the European Union,” she said.
The travel restrictions intentionally send a strong message to all groups that work to hold tech companies accountable. “It’s purely vindictive,” Greene says. “It’s designed to punish people from pursuing further work on disinformation or anti-hate work.” (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.)
And ultimately, this has a broad effect on who feels safe enough to participate online.
Ballon pointed to research that shows the “silencing effect” of harassment and hate speech, not only for “those who have been attacked,” but also for those who witness such attacks. This is particularly true for women, who tend to face more online hate that is also more sexualized and violent. It’ll only be worse if groups like HateAid get deplatformed or lose funding.
Von Hodenberg put it more bluntly: “They reclaim freedom of speech for themselves when they want to say whatever they want, but they silence and censor the ones that criticize them.”
Still, the HateAid directors insist they’re not backing down. They say they’re taking “all advice” they have received seriously, especially with regard to “becoming more independent from service providers,” Ballon told me.
“Part of the reason that they don’t like us is because we are strengthening our clients and empowering them,” said von Hodenberg. “We are making sure that they are not succeeding, and not withdrawing from the public debate.”
“So when they think they can silence us by attacking us? That is just a very wrong perception.”
Martin Sona contributed reporting.
