Lawsuit challenges US policy barring visas for social media researchers

A group of technology researchers filed a lawsuit on Monday alleging that US President Donald Trump’s administration has adopted an unconstitutional policy that targets foreign nationals who study disinformation and hate speech on social media for visa denials and deportation.

The San Francisco-based Coalition for Independent Technology Research in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington argues that the administration’s policy unlawfully chills the work of non-citizen researchers in the United States.

The group said the US State Department, while claiming it is fighting online censorship that Trump’s allies have argued has affected conservative speech on social media, is engaged in a “brazen and far-reaching campaign of censorship” targeting researchers and anti-disinformation advocates.

The lawsuit asks a judge to block the policy on the grounds that it violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections for free speech, Fifth Amendment promise of due process as well as requirements under a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act.

“The Trump administration is using the threat of detention and deportation to suppress speech it disfavors,” Carrie DeCell, a lawyer for the coalition at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement.

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement that the United States “is under no obligation to admit or suffer the presence of individuals who subvert our laws and deny our citizens their constitutional rights.”

The administration has made free speech, particularly what it sees as the stifling of conservative voices online, a focus of its foreign policy, including in Brazil and in Europe.

In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a visa ban on foreign nationals “complicit in censoring Americans.” Rubio said some foreign officials have engaged in “flagrant censorship actions against US tech companies and US citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so.”

In December, the State Department imposed visa bans on five Europeans, including a former European Union commissioner and anti-disinformation activists who Rubio called “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex.”

The department did so after EU tech regulators that month fined Elon Musk’s social media company X 120 million euros ($140 million) in the first sanction imposed under the EU’s landmark Digital Services Act, which is intended to combat hateful speech, misinformation and disinformation.

Among the five hit by the visa ban were Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index. Their groups are members of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, the lawsuit said. – Rappler.com