The Trump administration is taking steps to bar people who combat the spread of disinformation and hate speech from obtaining worker visas to enter the country.
For the past few years, I’ve been chronicling the conservative movement’s crusade against researchers and other experts who share knowledge about the spread of disinformation and hate speech online. As I explained during a recent “Velshi” appearance with my colleague Charles Coleman Jr., this crusade isn’t at all surprising: Figures in conservative politics have relied on such propaganda to energize and enrage their followers.
And a new State Department memo, reported by Reuters, looks to ramp up the GOP’s campaign against people who try to make social platforms less hateful and rife with manipulative lies — by making it harder for them to enter the U.S.
According to Reuters:
The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants — and family members who would be traveling with them — to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others. ‘If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible,’ under a specific article of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the cable said.
MS NOW hasn’t independently reviewed the memo, but the Trump administration certainly isn’t denying its existence. A State Department spokesperson told Reuters the department doesn’t comment on “allegedly leaked documents” but said “we do not support aliens coming to the United States to work as censors muzzling Americans.” The spokesperson told Reuters that Trump had been the victim of “abuse” when some social media companies kicked him off their platforms after he used them to fuel the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection. “He does not want other Americans to suffer this way,” the spokesperson said. “Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people.”
Complaints about censorship are rich coming from an administration that’s openly attacked the free press and sought to censor people for using their free speech rights to say things the administration doesn’t like. It’s also a perverse mischaracterization of what content moderation efforts actually do. Americans are not nefariously “muzzled” when independently owned social media platforms police hate speech and disinformation by applying their preferred rules, in much the same way it would be absurd to suggest that barring patrons from yelling racist epithets in their favorite local restaurant is a form of unfair oppression. Americans do not have an inalienable right to spew bigoted or manipulative bile however, whenever or wherever they want. And when conservatives have claimed to have smoking-gun evidence of political censorship by social media platforms — for example, with the debunked “Twitter Files” conspiracy theory pushed by Elon Musk — what the evidence has actually shown is social platforms engaged in reasoned discussions about what should be tolerated on their sites and why. Nonetheless, the administration appears to be using bogus allegations of “censorship” to advance two goals: undermining the fight against hate speech and disinformation while furthering its unabashedly bigoted anti-immigrant agenda by placing another obstacle before people looking to enter the U.S.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
