Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg paused the Trump administration’s effort to restrict visas from those it says perpetuate censorship against U.S. citizens.
“The policy, at its core, does not burden all speech about platforms, all research into content moderation, or all advocacy about online harms,” he wrote. “It presses its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale: the view that platforms should do more to moderate content, label disinformation, restrict abuse, share data with researchers, or take responsibility for the harms their systems amplify.”
“The Government, in other words, has not set itself against everyone who speaks about platform governance. It has set itself against those whose work favors more moderation rather than less,” Boasberg added.
He further argued: “Much of American political debate consists of disagreement over whether a practice is liberty or regulation, safety or suppression, accountability or censorship. The First Amendment does not permit officials to resolve that dispute by attaching legal burdens to the side they condemn.”
Last year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced visa restrictions on those who are “complicit in censoring Americans,” he said at the time.
“In some instances, foreign officials have taken flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. citizens and residents when they have no authority to do so,” he explained, adding that it is “unacceptable” for foreign officials to threaten U.S. citizens or residents for posts made on American platforms on American soil.
“It is similarly unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States,” he said. “We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty, especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech.”
