of the censoring non-censors for anti-censorship dept
You want to see it actual government censorship in action? And is this done by people who claim they are doing it to stop censorship? Consider last week’s revelation (originally reported by Reuters) that the US State Department will now start denying H-1B visas for anyone who has anything to do with trust and safety, fact checking, content moderation or research into disinformation. The government now punishes people for their speech – and especially for the false belief that their work constitutes censorship.
The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on Dec. 2, directs U.S. consular officials to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants — and family members who would travel with them — to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as disinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online security, among others.
“If you discover evidence that an applicant was responsible for or complicit in censorship or attempted censorship of protected speech in the United States, you must conclude that the applicant is ineligible,” according to a specific section of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
It’s like by J.D. Vance “By the rules you wouldn’t fact check me” taken to a new level.
This policy censors non-censors because they don’t do what the White House and MAGA people actively do every day. MAGA knows that content moderation is necessary; they like to apply this when it comes to speech they don’t like. As we recently discussed, they’re suddenly demanding that social media companies stop their foreign influence campaigns and remove anything nasty about Charlie Kirk. At the same time, the White House itself is pushing a distorted version of what it claims to actually control, demanding that media organizations hire MAGA-friendly censors.
The hypocrisy is the point. But it is also blatantly unconstitutional. As Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said in response to this news:
People who study disinformation and work on content moderation teams are not engaging in “censorship”; they engage in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is inconsistent and unconstitutional.
Incoherent and unconstitutional is being too kind.
The real work that trust and security professionals do makes this policy even more perverse. As a trust and security expert (and occasional Ctrl-Alt-Speech guest host) Alice Hunsberger told (the recently defunct) NPR:
“Trust and Safety is a broad practice that includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material]as well as preventing fraud, scams and extortion. T&S employees are focused on making the internet safer and better, not just censoring the internet,” she said. “Bad actors targeting Americans come from all over the world and it is so important to have people on trust and security teams who understand different languages and cultures. [trust and safety] definitely keeps Americans safer.”
That’s why the government is now banning access to people whose work includes stopping child sexual abuse material and protecting Americans from foreign bad actors — while claiming to oppose censorship and demanding that platforms remove content about Charlie Kirk. The only way this makes sense is if you understand what the actual principle is: we have control over all speech, and anyone who might interfere with that control should be punished.
There are no fundamental values at work here other than “we have power, and we are going to abuse it to silence anyone who stands in our way.”
Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, content moderation, disinformation, Donald Trump, fact checking, freedom of speech, h1-b visas, Marco Rubio, disinformation, trust and safety
#job #stop #CSAM #Trump #visa