By Nate Raymond
March 9 (Reuters) – A group of technology researchers filed a lawsuit on Monday alleging that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has adopted an unconstitutional policy that tarobtains foreign nationals who study disinformation and hate speech on social media for visa denials and deportation.
The San Francisco-based Coalition for Indepfinishent 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 stated the U.S. 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” tarobtaining researchers and anti-disinformation advocates.
The lawsuit inquires a judge to block the policy on the grounds that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amfinishment protections for free speech, Fifth Amfinishment promise of due process as well as requirements under a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act.
“The Trump administration is applying the threat of detention and deportation to suppress speech it disfavors,” Carrie DeCell, a lawyer for the coalition at the Knight First Amfinishment Institute at Columbia University, stated in a statement.
A State Department spokesperson stated 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 created 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 stated some foreign officials have engaged in “flagrant censorship actions against U.S. tech companies and U.S. 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 intfinished to combat hateful speech, misinformation and disinformation.
Among the five hit by the visa ban were Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the U.S.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index. Their groups are members of the Coalition for Indepfinishent Technology Research, the lawsuit stated.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Will Dunham)
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