Your speech, their rules: How foreign governments censor Americans

It is a random Tuesday night, and you are relaxing on your living room couch scrolling through your social media feed. You read an article about foreign corruption and decide to make a post criticizing the government responsible for it. You make fun of a politician you don’t like, share a clip from an interview with your favorite political talking head, crack a joke about a pressing social issue, or make a plug for the blog post that you just finished writing. Then, you head to bed without giving it a second thought. This is America, after all, and the First Amendment is always there to protect you from the government.

Well, to protect you from our government.

Under the First Amendment, the United States cannot retaliate against you for constitutionally protected speech and expression. But the First Amendment does not necessarily protect you from a bureaucrat in Brussels, a judge in Brazil, or a police force in Hong Kong. Consider the case of Saad Ibrahim Almadi.

Almadi was a retired engineer living in Boca Raton, Florida. A dual U.S.-Saudi citizen, Almadi had lived in America since the 1970s and, over the past several years, had made around 14 posts criticizing the Saudi Arabian government. Those posts raised concerns about the destruction of older sections of Mecca and Jeddah, issues surrounding poverty in Saudi Arabia, and a few mentioned the assassination of the U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was visiting a Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. He voiced the same kinds of political grievances that millions of Americans talk and post about every day. And for years, nothing happened.

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Then, in November 2021, Almadi took a trip to Riyadh to visit his family. He was arrested almost immediately after he landed and accused of “harboring a terrorist ideology.” In October 2022, a Saudi Arabian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, followed by a 16-year travel ban preventing Almadi from leaving the country. An appeals court later increased his sentence to 19 years with a 19-year travel ban. Since Almadi was already in his 70s at the time, this meant that he would likely never return to the United States. He was eventually released after the charges against him were dropped in March 2023, but his travel ban remained in place.

Almadi did not make it back to the United States until November 2025, four years after he had left, and only after the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally visited the White House. His crime? Criticizing a foreign government from American soil.

It’s easy to write this off as an example of the repressive nature of an authoritarian monarchy. Surely a fellow liberal democracy, especially one that claims to have a proud tradition of free speech and expression, would never treat someone like that, right?

Unfortunately, Graham Linehan serves as an example of how even democratically elected governments regularly try to punish politically disfavored speech that occurs outside their borders. Linehan is an Irish comedy writer responsible for shows like Father Ted and The IT Crowd. He has been living in Arizona while he works on his next project. In April 2025, Linehan made a handful of posts about transgender activists. In several different posts, he advised women encountering a transwoman “in a female-only space” to “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Later that year, Linehan took a flight from Arizona to Heathrow. When he stepped off the plane, five armed police officers arrested him for his comments, seized his bag and devices, and told him he could only post bail if he promised to stay off X. 

Thankfully, in May 2026, the Metropolitan Police apologized after an internal review found that “at times, both the investigation and arrest phases lacked the diligence one would expect.” But the message had already been conveyed loud and clear: Even comments you make outside the country have the potential to land you in jail.

The way to deal with these situations may seem simple enough. Stay in the United States and you will be fine, right? Not quite.

Anna Kwok is a U.S.-based activist who lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves as the executive director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council. In her role, Kwok meets with American lawmakers, speaks at public events, and urges the U.S. government to sanction foreign officials that she believes are undermining freedom in Hong Kong.

In July 2023, Hong Kong police issued arrest warrants for Kwok and seven other overseas activists, offering HK$1 million (about $128,000) bounties for each of them. Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee said that the activists would be “pursued for life” for their political advocacy. That December, police added five more names to the list of warrants. Their alleged crimes included calling for international sanctions on Hong Kong.

Whatever power a foreign government might have over speech within their own borders, they have no business censoring American speech. 

Hong Kong could not arrest Anna Kwok, as she was living in the United States, well outside its jurisdiction. It could, however, arrest her father, Kwok Yin-sang, who still lived in Hong Kong. In February 2026, a Hong Kong court sentenced the 69-year-old man to eight months in prison for trying to withdraw money from an education insurance policy he had opened for Kwok when she was a child. The prosecutors accused her father of handling funds linked to an “absconder.”

Some governments appear to be willing to go even further. Just ask Garry Kasparov. The former world chess champion has spent years criticizing Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. Just this month, he said that U.S. security services warned him that his life was in danger and urged him to take precautions. The same month, the Justice Department announced charges against five people it alleges were working for Russian intelligence services to photograph locations tied to exiled Putin critics and offer as much as $40,000 to have them killed. Two of the alleged targets were located in the United States. In its allegations, the DOJ specifically described it as a “plot by the Russian intelligence services to murder a dissident on U.S. soil for daring to speak out against the Russian government.”

While it is not clear whether Kasparov was one of the potential targets, he said that he was one of two Russian dissidents that were recently warned about their safety. Kasparov also said that while he has taken certain precautions, he “will not stop and … will not hide.”

But maybe you would never publicly criticize or lobby against a foreign government. Maybe you would just quietly organize something like, I don’t know, a video call.

In June 2020, U.S.-based activists Zhou Fengsuo and Wang Dan set up Zoom calls to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese government told Zoom the events were illegal in China and had the company shut down three of the four commemorations and suspended the hosts’ accounts. Zoom later admitted to shutting down the calls and restored Zhou’s and Wang’s accounts. That December, the U.S. Justice Department charged a China-based Zoom employee with conspiring to disrupt the meetings and to pass information about the participants to Chinese authorities. FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “Americans should understand that the Chinese Government will not hesitate to exploit companies operating in China to further their international agenda, including repression of free speech.”

Using the carriers of speech as a hook to go after the speech itself is by no means a new tactic. Two decades ago, American author Rachel Ehrenfeld published Funding Evil, a book that accused Saudi Arabian billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz of financing terrorism. The book was never published in the United Kingdom, but 23 copies were bought there through online booksellers. That was enough for bin Mahfouz to sue Ehrenfeld for libel in London, where defamation laws are much more favorable to the plaintiff.

Ehrenfeld refused to recognize the foreign court’s jurisdiction and never appeared before it. Even so, in 2005, a High Court judge entered a default judgment against Ehrenfeld, ordering her to pay £10,000 in damages to each of the plaintiffs, as well as court costs. The court also demanded that Ehrenfeld issue a correction and an apology. Ehrenfeld then asked a court in New York for protection from the judgment, but New York’s highest court ultimately held that existing law could not provide her with the protection she was seeking because it did not have jurisdiction over Mahfouz.

In response, in 2008, New York passed what came to be known as “Rachel’s Law,” which protects New Yorkers from foreign libel judgments that are inconsistent with the First Amendment. Then, in 2010, Congress passed the SPEECH Act, barring U.S. courts from enforcing foreign defamation judgments that do not satisfy America’s requirements for freedom of speech.

Unfortunately, the pressure that governments place on the carriers of speech continues to this day, and much of it has been directed towards online platforms.

In July 2024, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X (the website formerly known as Twitter) to block the account of Allan Lopes Dos Santos, a Brazilian journalist living in the United States. When X refused to comply with the order, Justice Moraes fined the company, froze its financial assets in the country, and eventually ordered X to cease its operations in Brazil entirely. A few months later, Justice Moraes went on to target Rumble for failing to censor Dos Santos and, just like with X, barred the company from operating in Brazil. In fact, Justice Moraes has ordered American companies to remove content across the globe on several different occasions, and has regularly targeted speech that originated in the United States. And Brazil is just one of many jurisdictions trying to impose global censorship demands by going after online platforms.

On Aug. 12, 2024, just hours before a live conversation between Elon Musk and then-candidate Donald Trump on X, European Commissioner Thierry Breton publicly posted a letter cautioning Musk about the upcoming conversation and invoking X's legal obligations under the Digital Services Act. In trying to prevent X from hosting the conversation, the letter cited “a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in [the EU] in connection with events with major audience[s] around the world.” In the letter, Commissioner Breton warned that he would be “extremely vigilant to any evidence that points to breaches of the DSA and will not hesitate to make full use of [the EU’s] toolbox” to address the situation. In spite of these thinly veiled threats, X decided to continue with the conversation anyway.

While companies like X and Rumble can afford to fight back against censorship demands from foreign officials, for smaller companies, it will be much harder to resist. And these global censorship efforts are particularly harmful for free speech and expression as online platforms tend to adopt the same practices across jurisdictions. As a result, the most aggressive governments are often able to write the rules for everyone else, and online speech is effectively subject to a regulatory heckler’s veto.

In fact, some foreign governments have made this their very goal, explicitly ordering the removal of content both in and outside their borders. In 2017, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that Google could be forced to remove search results worldwide. In 2019, the European Union’s highest court held that Facebook could be forced to remove specific types of content across the globe. In 2024, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner tried to force X to completely remove a video from its platform, not just in Australia. And while some companies have resisted such efforts, others have decided it is easier to just comply. In February 2026, the House Judiciary Committee issued a report documenting how TikTok has already revised its global Community Guidelines explicitly “to achieve compliance with the Digital Services Act.”

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Thankfully, some American lawmakers have taken notice and are attempting to push back against these kinds of foreign censorship efforts. For example, the Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion (GRANITE) Act, introduced by Rep. Michael Rulli and Sen. Mike Lee, includes a section that would prevent U.S. courts from enforcing foreign judgments or orders that burden speech in ways that are inconsistent with the First Amendment. It would extend the SPEECH Act’s shield from libel claims to all foreign judgments that would burden constitutionally protected speech. So if a foreign government tried to weaponize U.S. courts to enforce any of the censorship described above, the court could reject it out of hand. 

While it is not clear whether the GRANITE Act will ultimately become law, the principle behind it is a simple one. Whatever power a foreign government might have over speech within their own borders, they have no business censoring American speech. U.S. officials should prioritize these issues in our international diplomacy and work with foreign governments to establish norms and legal protections against cross-border speech policing across the globe, while ensuring we are doing the same within our borders. 

America fought a revolution 250 years ago over the idea that officials across the ocean should not restrict our freedoms here at home. So as you are sitting on your couch about to make that Tuesday-night post criticizing a foreign government, remember: You should not need a lawyer, a travel advisor, or a phone call to check on your family before you hit send. Americans can and should criticize foreign governments that censor their own people, and they should do so without being afraid that they may be censored themselves.