The US is now blocking visas for people who fight misinformation

Earlier this month, the State Department announced that it was instructing U.S. embassy staff around the world to reject work visa applications from individuals involved in what it described as “censorship” of Americans’ speech online. In a cable that was first leaked to Reuters, consular officers were instructed to review LinkedIn profiles of visa applicants mentioning work history involving “misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance, and online safety.” This work includes journalists and fact-checkers, academics, people working in media literacy, and a broad range of tech workers in a field known as “Trust and Safety.” 

This isn’t the first such visa restriction stemming from what the Trump administration views as censorship. Nor is it the first Republican assault on academics and tech workers who monitor online disinformation. Instead, this represents the latest escalation in a five-year campaign by the GOP and its allies to discredit misinformation research, which they’ve long contended silences conservative views.

In April 2022, the Biden administration appointed Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher, to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, tasked with aiding government efforts to understand and mitigate false information related to border security, human trafficking, and domestic terrorism. Almost immediately, the board came under attack from Republicans like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and far-right pundit Tucker Carlson, who likened the body to a “Ministry of Truth.” 

Jankowicz herself endured all manner of abuse, including death threats and threats of sexual violence; she resigned her post in May of 2022 and the entire project was shuttered by the end of that summer. In the years since, she cofounded the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit aimed at protecting Americans from disinformation, and serves as its CEO.

The Republican attempt to kneecap disinformation researchers, she says, is “part of a broader attack not only on trust and safety or content moderation, but on anybody and any organization that attempts to safeguard our shared reality or the truth.” 

‘Woke speech police’

There was a time when combating misinformation and foreign interference in elections was a bipartisan effort. In 2018, Facebook was summoned to congress to answer for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a British consultancy was accused of targeting Russian election disinformation to Facebook users. “We’re here because of what you, Mr. Zuckerberg, have described as a breach of trust, “Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota) said to Zuckerberg.

Meta and other tech companies soon ramped up their fact-checking operations. Meta began partnering with news outlets like Snopes, the Associated Press, and others, to fact check viral information online. It also tightened its data-sharing policies, expanded its policy teams, and implemented a global trusted partner program to work with nonprofits to monitor harmful content online. It was an imperfect system, but certainly better than what platforms had done prior to 2016. 

But those enforcement policies wound up angering Republicans, who felt disproportionately targeted by them.Tech companies were not in fact censoring their freedom of speech. Even if they had been, it wouldn’t be a violation of the First Amendment, which only protects citizens from government censorship. 

The problem was Republicans’ tendency to disseminate material that contains misleading content. One study found that conservatives were eight times more likely to spread misinformation than those who lean liberal. 

After 2020, conservative ire at tech companies for censoring their posts reached a fever pitch, fueled by the platforms’ attempt to regulate anti-vaccine content during the Covid-19 pandemic and their deprioritizing of reports about allegedly compromising information about President Biden on his son Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

By 2023, when Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, became chair of the House Judiciary Committee, his party began subpoenaing Big Tech and research organizations that study online hate speech and misinformation. In tandem, lawsuits from Republican activists against those very research organizations eventually made it politically and financially cumbersome for many of these organizations to continue functioning. The Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent disinformation watchdog, effectively shuttered its doors due to Republican attacks last year. 

“Big Tech is out to get conservatives, and is increasingly willing to undermine First Amendment values by complying with the Biden Administration’s directives that suppress freedom of speech online,” Jordan wrote to Zuckerberg in his 2022 subpoena. “Because of Big Tech’s wide reach, it can serve as a powerful and effective partisan arm of the ‘woke speech police.’”

Capitulation

As it became clear Donald Trump could defeat Kamala Harris in last year’s election, Zuckerberg capitulated — first with reticence, then with enthusiasm. 

In August of last year, he sent a letter to Jordan apologizing for letting the platform go too far in censoring posts related to the COVID-19 vaccine—which Republicans have sowed skepticism over its perceived safety. Zuckerberg also admitted that Meta demoted posts about the Hunter Biden scandal.

Then, this January, shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg, wearing a black t-shirt and gold pendant chain, hosted an infamous Facebook Live in which he announced that his company would no longer invest in fact-checking. Echoing Gaetz and Carlson, the CEO attacked legacy media for focusing too much on the threat of misinformation to democracy. “Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” he said.

There’s also a significant financial motivation behind divesting from trust and safety initiatives. “They don’t want to spend all that money on what is a very expensive investment,” Jankowicz says. By Meta’s own estimates the company has spent $20 billion on trust and safety operations since 2016. 

It’s one thing for tech companies to fire their fact-checkers and content moderators — for the most part, they’re within their legal right to do so, as long as they figure out an alternative way to remove child abuse material. It’s a very different thing for the government to obstruct tech companies from hiring content moderators, which arguably is a violation of the company’s first amendment rights. 

Theodora Skeadas, a former associate on Twitter’s Public Policy team, worries that the new rules will be used to harass trust and safety workers in the same way researchers like Jankowicz have been harassed. “The work we do as trust and safety workers involves ensuring safe experiences for children and women online, and fighting fraud, terrorism, and hate,” she says. ”I observe the irony, too, that this measure entails heavy-handed censorship.” Skeadas says that trust & safety workers are scrubbing their LinkedIn of the keywords the government might find objectionable. 

A Faustian bargain

While Big Tech CEOs were quick to speak out against the Trump administration’s blanket $100,000 fees for H-1B workers—which would have disproportionately impacted foreign software engineers working for major tech firms (and now appears to have been dramatically narrowed in scope)—not a single CEO has spoken out against these new rules.

That might be because the newfound allyship with Trump seems to be paying off for the platforms. The Trump administration has spent much of this year attacking foreign tech regulators, including in the E.U., which recently passed the Digital Services Act—requiring social media companies to more aggressively police disinformation and other illegal content—and the Digital Markets Act, which was designed to curb Big Tech’s anti-competitive practices.

“Since the administration has been in office, there has been an increasing amount of pressure and, I would say, attacks on regulators, civil servants, and researchers abroad as well,” Jankowicz says.

The administration has even sanctioned foreign officials for attempting to regulate Big Tech companies. This summer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced very similar restrictions to the H1B memo for foreign government workers who the administration viewed as targeting Americans’ First amendment rights. The administration sanctioned Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and, later, his wife, under this new policy in what appears to be a politically motivated retribution for ordering Twitter be blocked in Brazil and later extended the sanctions to his wife. 

For the tech companies, there’s a clear upside to this Faustian bargain: Go along with the administration’s narrative on censorship—even if that means sacrificing the safety of your own workers and risking the further fracturing of American society—and the entire might of the U.S. government will reward you.

source https://www.fastcompany.com/91459921/visas-disinformation-trump-zuckerberg-meta