Five UK and Euro agents of the “global censorship-industrial complex” who “led organized efforts to coerce” the suppression of American viewpoints have been sanctioned by the U.S. government and are barred from entering the country, the State Department announced.
Imran Ahmed, a British citizen and the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the notorious censorship and deplatforming outfit which defined its central mission as “Kill Musk’s Twitter” and is closely linked to the inner circle of British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, has been sanctioned by the United States government.
The CCDH, a homologue of America’s Sleeping Giants censorship campaign group, proclaims its mission as thus: “We expose the producers and spreaders of hate and disinformation, and demonstrate the offline consequences.”
In 2020 the CCDH pressured Google to ban conservative publishers, including Breitbart, and in 2021 was at the centre of a Covid-era plot to smear Breitbart News and other publications in a bid to see them blacklisted from social media. A House Judiciary Committee investigation into the CCDH’s collusion with the Biden government and social media companies to censor the internet saw the NGO subpoenaed in 2023.
More recently, the CCDH has been revealed to have been a creation of the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney, who is alleged to have organised a clandestine astroturf censorship campaign targeting political rivals and outlets like Breitbart News.
Under the terms of the order imposed by the U.S. State Department, CCDH CEO Ahmed is banned from entering the country, and can be deported if present. “Certain family members may also be covered by these restrictions”, the State Department added.
Addressing the CCDH, U.S. Undersecretary of State Sarah B Rogers said on Tuesday that the sanctions target “the censorship-NGO ecosystem” and said that Ahmed was a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.”
She said: “Ahmed’s group, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), created the infamous “disinformation dozen” report, which called for platforms to deplatform twelve American “anti-vaxxers”, including now-HHS Secretary [Kennedy].”
Noting destroying Twitter after it was acquired by Elon Musk and weaponising British and European law to attack U.S. social media platforms were cited as priorities by Ahmed’s CCDH in internal documents, Rogers said Ahmed’s organisation works to “expand censorship in Europe and around the world”.
Rogers cited earlier remarks when she outlined the U.S. government’s determination to protect the First Amendment from foreign interference. She had told British news network GB News on December 4th that foreigners trying to censor Americans was a “red line”.
She said then: “applying [Britain’s Online Safety Act] to speech that has nothing to do with Britain, does not occur in Britain, is on American platforms by American users on American political issues, purporting to censor Americans in America is a dealbreaker. It is a non-starter, it is a red line”.
Overnight, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement the new sanctions were made against “radical activists and weaponized NGOs… agents of the global censorship-industrial complex” who had ” led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies.”
As earlier reported, reflexive censorship, viewpoint suppression, and deplatforming became an integral part of the British government with the coming of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who tapped as his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, the British political organiser central to the nexus of newly-made bodies such as the CCDH and Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN).
Revelations claimed by South African investigative journalist Paul Holden, citing “a trove of documents that expose the operation”, state McSweeney’s allegedly funded Labour Together ‘think tank’ created these lobbying NGOs disguised as astroturfed grassroots campaigns to push censorship. Holden asserted:
McSweeney and his allies blew up British politics, with a blast radius that extended across the pond to the United States… to launch an astroturf campaign that mounted a ferocious attack on non-conformist media and free speech on both sides of the Atlantic.
The campaign was catalyzed by a desire to demonetize and delegitimize outlets who reported sympathetically on factional opponents of McSweeney and his allies… That campaign directly sought to “cancel” outlets reporting favorably on Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party.
It also made several ad-hominem attacks on U.S. President Donald Trump personally and sought to ensure that Breitbart was barred from receiving any advertising at all from the UK’s Cabinet office. This was all conducted behind a veil of misdirection and secrecy.
Holden states that efforts have allegedly been made to cover up McSweeney’s role in funding and creating the CCDH and SFFN, but that, nevertheless, this “most powerful unelected official in British politics” organised a carefully concealed foreign influence operation to control the U.S. media landscape.
Beyond Ahmed, four other figures in the UK and Europe were sanctioned, including the European Union’s infamous Censorship Tsar Thierry Breton, who crashed out of the bloc after going toe-to-toe with Elon Musk and losing. Nevertheless, his European Digital Services Act remains a major force in global censorship.
Global Disinformation Index (GDI) boss Clare Melford was sanctioned, with Under Secretary Rogers noting the GDI purports to fight “hate speech” and “disinformation” but actually uses “taxpayer money to exhort censorship and blacklisting of American speech and press”. Also subjected to sanctions were Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, the leaders of Germany’s HateAid, which “counters conservative groups” and is a censor that works for the European Union.
Ironically, the HateAid bosses responded to the announcement by accusing the U.S. government of “trying to silence its critics by any means necessary”.
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