Judge: Trump can’t deport researchers just for working in content moderation - Ars Technica

Overview

Judge: Trump can’t deport researchers just for working in content moderationvar abtest_2163229 = new ABTest(2163229, 'click');

Disinformation researchers praise ruling blocking Trump visa denials and deportations.

Details

This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

In an opinion published Tuesday, US District Judge James Boasberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the State Department from enforcing the policy until the CITR’s lawsuit is resolved.

On its face, the policy does not require visa denials or deportations. Instead, it authorizes immigration investigations into individuals suspected of helping foreign adversaries attempt to manipulate public opinion by suppressing US speech.

Over the course of the litigation, the State Department so far has failed to prove that any of the five researchers explicitly targeted under the policy had any connection to a foreign power attempting to censor Americans or manipulate US public debate. Left unchecked, the State Department’s authority seemingly had “no clear stopping point short of the [content moderation] field itself,” Boasberg said.

The attacks on trust and safety workers just doing their jobs are particularly concerning, since Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened that his department “stands ready and willing to expand” the list of targeted researchers, Boasberg said. That’s why Boasberg paused the policy’s enforcement broadly, rather than limiting the injunction to only CITR members, as the State Department had requested. As the judge explained:

“A lawful permanent resident working on a platform’s trust-and-safety team, a noncitizen researcher urging stronger disinformation labels, a compliance employee helping apply moderation rules, or an advocacy leader pressing advertisers away from sites that spread falsehoods could reasonably understand the policy to place their immigration status at risk—not because they wield foreign sovereign power or facilitate its censorship, but simply because they work in content moderation.”

“A lawful permanent resident working on a platform’s trust-and-safety team, a noncitizen researcher urging stronger disinformation labels, a compliance employee helping apply moderation rules, or an advocacy leader pressing advertisers away from sites that spread falsehoods could reasonably understand the policy to place their immigration status at risk—not because they wield foreign sovereign power or facilitate its censorship, but simply because they work in content moderation.”

According to Boasberg, the State Department was putting “its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale” in an ongoing, heated public debate over how much content moderation is permissible before platforms cross a line into censorship. In line with President Trump’s views, any noncitizen researcher who favors more moderation would seemingly be more likely to be penalized under the policy than a researcher who favors less moderation, Boasberg suggested.

CITR argued an injunction was necessary to avoid irreparable harms, and the government didn’t even dispute that, Boasberg said, seemingly expecting to prove that the CITR had no standing and focusing its arguments there.

However, CITR presented evidence, corroborated by other researchers, that the policy chilled research, advocacy, and travel. For CITR, the policy specifically impaired its reporting, messed with events, increased its costs, and diminished its public-facing work.

Boasberg ruled that CITR showed enough evidence of harm to likely prove that the policy violated the First Amendment by improperly censoring researchers based on their viewpoints.

“Much of American political debate consists of disagreement over whether a practice is liberty or regulation, safety or suppression, accountability or censorship,” Boasberg wrote. “The First Amendment does not permit officials to resolve that dispute by attaching legal burdens to the side they condemn.”

Among the first targets of the State Department’s policy were online safety researchers who criticized X, whose owner, Elon Musk, remains a Trump ally.

Former European Commissioner Thierry Breton was targeted partly for sending a letter to X in 2024 concerning X’s obligations under the Digital Services Act. Breton’s case is the closest that the State Department came in alleging that a targeted noncitizen was conspiring with a foreign power to censor US speech.

But Boasberg said that the State Department’s argument clashed with its own assessment of what constituted a foreign sovereign threat under the policy. The judge noted that the department had investigated whether European regulators were using the DSA to censor Americans and found “no evidence” of overreach enabling the censorship or criminalization of online speech.

Further, the State Department could not connect any of the other targeted researchers to its policy interest in barring their entry into the US.

Boasberg did not suggest the policy itself is illegal, only the seemingly unconstitutional enforcement of the policy against people working in content moderation without concerning ties to foreign governments. He warned that CITR was likely to prevail on First Amendment claims, given the “mismatch” between the department’s “asserted interest and the policy’s demonstrated operation is stark.”

Researchers targeted by the State Department celebrated the ruling, even though fears of broader retaliation remain as the lawsuit proceeds.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), faced the threat of deportation with no advance notice, which was only temporarily blocked after filing a separate lawsuit that remains ongoing.

The CCDH publicly sparred with Musk in lengthy litigation over an X ad boycott that Musk ultimately lost, with a judge ruling that X’s lawsuit was about “punishing” the CCDH for its speech. The State Department didn’t mention X specifically but claimed that they targeted Ahmed due to “CCDH’s research documenting hate and disinformation” on social media platforms and “its campaigns pressing advertisers and the platforms to act on what it found,” Boasberg wrote.

In a statement provided to Ars, Ahmed suggested that Big Tech interests influenced the Trump administration’s attack on trust and safety researchers.

“I started the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, 10 years ago to shed light on the staggering amount of hate, fraud, even self-harm and violence facilitated by social media,” Ahmed said. “Billionaire (now trillionaire) tech executives, their lobbyists, and the politicians who do their bidding call that ‘censorship.’ But seeking to increase transparency about major tech platforms is not censorship. Censorship occurs when the government tries to revoke the green cards of people whose views its biggest donors would prefer not to hear. Holding up a mirror to power is not censorship. Deporting the person holding the mirror is.”

Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon agreed with Ahmed that the State Department was moving to benefit social media companies that risk losing ad revenue when their platforms are deemed unsafe. The CEOs of Hate Aid, a German nonprofit that helps victims of online abuse get harmful content removed, were targeted seemingly solely for the work that they do.

In a joint statement on Boasberg’s ruling, the CEOs said that “today’s decision sends a powerful message. Independent tech researchers who are working to understand the risks posed by online platforms to children and society—including the dissemination of disinformation and antisemitism—must not be punished for doing so. This ruling makes it clear that fundamental rights in the United States must not be sacrificed for the sake of online platforms’ commercial interests.”

Finally, the co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), Clare Melford, was similarly targeted for that group’s former work publishing “disinformation risk ratings” to help news and information sites assess platform trustworthiness. In a statement, she joined others praising the court’s decision to pause enforcement and lift travel restrictions.

“This is a victory for free speech and a defeat for those who fear it. GDI informs free market transactions in online advertising,” Melford said. “Banning me as CEO from travel to the United States was an unacceptable attempt by the government to censor me and interfere in the free market.”

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Key Takeaways

• Judge: Trump can’t deport researchers just for working in content moderationvar abtest_2163229 = new ABTest(2163229, 'click');

• Disinformation researchers praise ruling blocking Trump visa denials and deportations

• This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety

• In an opinion published Tuesday, US District Judge James Boasberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the State Department from enforcing the policy until the CITR’s lawsuit is resolved

• On its face, the policy does not require visa denials or deportations