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.
