A British anti-disinformation campaigner who the Trump administration is attempting to ban from the US has blamed big tech for his predicament and accused its bosses of being “sociopathic” in their opposition to accountability.
Imran Ahmed is CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which works to stop the spread of disinformation online. He is one of two British nationals, and five Europeans in total, who have been denied US visas after the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said they were “radical” activists who had “weaponised” their organisations to censor American speakers and companies.
Ahmed, who lives in the US, told The Observer the sanctions against the five are “really about the pressure being placed by big money and big tech in Washington”.
“What they’re trying to do is take a legal permanent resident of the United States away from their family, and doing so on unconstitutional grounds,” he said. Ahmed is believed to be the only individual targeted who currently lives in the US. “We’ve taken on some of the most powerful, wealthy human beings in the history of this planet – social media and AI bosses. They are sociopathic in their unwillingness to be held accountable.”
In October 2024, Elon Musk called the CCDH a “criminal organisation” and said he would go to “war” with it. On 24 December, the billionaire celebrated the visa sanctions, reposting a reaction on X with the comment “This is so great” and a smiley-face emoji.
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Also facing restrictions is British national Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a non-profit that seeks to counter online disinformation through collaborating “with governments and regulators to support rules that improve accountability online”.
On X on 23 December, Sarah Rogers, US under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, accused the GDI of using “taxpayer money to exhort censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press”.
The GDI is suing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over claims that its chair, Andrew Ferguson, and Trump administration officials launched a harassment investigation against it for listing conservative news outlets as top sources of disinformation in 2022.
A GDI spokesperson said: “The visa sanctions announced last week are an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship. [These] actions today are immoral, unlawful, and un-American.”
The US state department has insinuated that more individuals could face visa restrictions.
The European Commission has said it “strongly condemns” the visa restrictions and will, if needed, “respond swiftly and decisively to defend our regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures”.
Mark Thomas/Alamy Live News