Since its earliest days back in office, the Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online.
Now, some of those researchers are fighting back. Last week their lawsuit—which could have global repercussions for online safety and free speech—made its first appearance in court.
This fight started a year ago, when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on X what he called a “visa restriction policy” against “foreign officials and other persons” who were “complicit in censoring Americans.” Since then, a handful of foreign officials and researchers have been barred from travel to the US, and in theory, anyone working in fact-checking or online trust and safety more broadly could face the same restrictions.
Still, the exact implications of Rubio’s announcement are unclear—purposefully so, argues Carrie DeCell, a lawyer representing the researchers. “This policy is expansive and incredibly vague, and the chilling effects are correspondingly enormous,” DeCell said outside the courthouse in Washington, DC, on May 13.
The case has been brought by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR), an advocacy organization for tech researchers. It is suing Rubio, former US secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem, and former US attorney general Pam Bondi and asking the court to strike down the policy as unconstitutional. In their complaint, the plaintiffs say the policy violates the speech and due process rights of foreign-born tech researchers and workers whose “work supports greater moderation of content on the [tech] platforms.”
CITR is represented by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute and the legal nonprofit Protect Democracy. DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, tells MIT Technology Review that they’re in court because the Trump administration is effectively “using immigration law to punish people for expressing views that it disagrees with.”
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s “America Undone” series, examining how the foundations of US success in science and innovation are currently under threat. You can read the rest here.
Most immediately, the plaintiffs are asking the government to halt these visa restrictions while the case proceeds. Zachariah Lindsey, the assistant US attorney representing Rubio and the other defendants, argued in last week’s hearing that the government is not targeting speech but, rather, “conduct [that] is assisting or facilitating foreign government censorship of free speech.” At the end of the week, the government filed a motion to dismiss the case.
The judge has yet to rule on either motion, and his questions so far appeared to focus on parsing what (and who) is actually affected by the State Department’s announcements, as well as other procedural issues.
The outcome of the case may ultimately affect how much the public knows about the risks of social media and AI, says Nicole Schneidman, head of Protect Democracy’s technology and data governance team. The workers bringing this suit, she says, “serve a really, really important function in educating the public, holding tech companies accountable, doing research on the ramifications that advanced technology has on our society.”
“A political witch hunt”
CITR’s lawsuit is the latest salvo in a yearslong battle over how the internet should be moderated, and by whom—a question that has become increasingly political and entangled in allegations of censorship.
For years, Trump and his allies have claimed to be victims of a vast conspiracy between government agencies, civil society groups, academics, and Big Tech platforms to specifically censor conservative voices online. According to this narrative, a so-called “censorship-industrial complex” helped the Biden administration subvert First Amendment protections on speech by allegedly outsourcing censorship to these groups.
The State Department claims Rubio was able to implement the immigration policy because the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes him to “render inadmissible any alien whose entry into the United States ‘would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.’” Before the current Trump administration, the statute was rarely invoked, and when it was, it was typically with more limited, specific criteria, rather than its current application against anyone who has participated in alleged censorship—an action that has no legal definition.
The administration first deployed the policy in July 2025, when Rubio issued a statement announcing the revocation of visas for Alexandre de Moraes, the lead justice on the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, and “his allies on the court” who were involved in prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president. The prosecution was a “political witch hunt,” said Rubio, calling it evidence of a “censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also … targets Americans.”
Then, in early December, the State Department issued instructions to embassies to reject H-1B visa applications from individuals who had worked specifically in fact-checking, online trust and safety, and mis- or disinformation research, as Reuters first reported.
A few weeks later, on December 23, the agency announced visa restrictions for five Europeans whom it accused of censoring Americans. This included two CITR members: Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which documents hate speech on social media platforms, and Clare Melford, cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, which ranks websites according to how often they publish hate speech and disinformation. Also banned were the former European Union commissioner Thierry Breton, a key architect of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (which the State Department has called “Orwellian” and an example of censorship), and Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, co-CEOs of HateAid, a German nonprofit that fights online hate speech.
Ahmed, who lives in the US with his American wife and child, quickly filed his own lawsuit to stave off deportation and halt the policy. A preliminary injunction preventing his detention and deportation is in place as the lawsuit continues.
The Department of Homeland Security referred questions from MIT Technology Review to the State Department, which referred “specific questions” to the Department of Justice, while also writing that “the Trump Administration believes that aliens who are or were involved or complicit in censoring American citizens must face appropriate consequences. An American visa is a privilege not a right.” The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
“A gut punch”
Now, more tech researchers are fighting back.
CITR represents 500 individual and institutional members in 47 countries; 40 are based in the United States, including around 30 noncitizens. The organization argues that US-based tech researchers are experiencing a widespread chilling effect and are having to change or reframe what they’re studying so that it’s less explicitly (or less obviously) about content moderation or countering disinformation. Alternatively, some are leaving the US altogether, or making plans to do so, in order to safely carry out their work.
CITR member Eirliani Abdul Rahman, a Singaporean online safety expert and a founding member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, is one of these individuals. Her experience was included, though described anonymously, in CITR’s initial legal complaint.
Back in December 2022, shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, Rahman and two other Trust and Safety Council members publicly resigned. They spoke out against “red lines” the new owner had crossed, including his reinstatement of accounts that had previously been banned, and noted the marked increase in hate speech on the platform.
Musk disbanded the council days later, but first he retweeted a post that tagged Rahman and the others and said: “You all belong in jail.” This led to a level of online harassment, doxxing, and death threats that she had never before experienced. “I was trained as an economist, and I could just see line graphs form in my head of the stochastic jump in what happened,” Rahman says, referring to the way the dangerous attention spiked after Musk effectively endorsed the other user’s provocation.
This experience inspired her to pursue a new area of research: using quantitative methods to study and hopefully stop social media harassment “in real time,” she says.
“The ones that are most harassed are people [who] have historically been marginalized,” she adds. “Most of us know about this already, like it’s intuitive. But until you quantify it, sometimes it’s just not seen and taken seriously.”
But then Trump was reelected, making the work feel untenable. The US quickly became “a funding desert” for scientific research, she says, with federal support for any research perceived by conservatives to focus on mis/disinformation getting cut. At the same time, tech companies shifted their positions on content moderation to align with the president’s, meaning that her research would be unlikely to have any practical implications: “There’s simply no guardrails around social media anymore,” she says.
Fast-forward to December 2025, and the travel bans on the five Europeans felt like “a gut punch to the stomach,” Rahman says. She and Ahmed had both testified earlier in the year before the UK Parliament on the role social media played in spreading false claims about the supposed Muslim identity of a murderer who had killed three British girls; this online activity contributed to violent anti-immigrant and Islamophobic riots across the country in the summer of 2024.
The targeting of Ahmed and the other Europeans “was the last straw” for Rahman. Soon after, she left the US for a three-year fellowship in Germany aimed at supporting “international academic freedom”—coincidentally arriving in the country on the same day CITR filed its lawsuit.
“My body just calmed down,” Rahman says of landing in Germany. “I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night … always wondering about the next executive order and how it pertained to my situation.”
Rahman believes this legal battle has implications that reach beyond CITR members and their families. It “pertains to all immigrants in the US to protect our First Amendment rights,” she says.
Additionally, whether fact-checkers, online trust and safety workers, and tech researchers can continue to do their work has a broader impact on anyone who uses the internet.
Earlier this year, for example, Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate published widely cited research that Grok’s image-editing feature had generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 images of children, in an 11-day period. This led to government investigations, lawsuits, and even temporary bans for Grok’s parent company, xAI, across the United States and world.
“The threats have really sharpened”
MIT Technology Review has reported extensively on this right-wing war on supposed censorship; one of our stories revealing that State Department leadership requested communications records from a now-shuttered office focused on countering foreign disinformation has been included as an exhibit in the CITR lawsuit. This request sought insight into communications with a slew of individuals some far-right activists allege are involved in the “censorship-industrial complex,” including journalists, the German foreign minister, and numerous researchers studying disinformation and hate speech (including Medford, Ahmed, and their organizations).
DeCell tells us that over the past year and a half, there have been more lawsuits against the Trump administration regarding free speech—because “the threats have really sharpened,” she says.
Last year, the Knight Institute sued Rubio on behalf of of university faculty and students who have been arrested, detained, and deported for their pro-Palestinian speech; this past January, a judge ruled that the administration’s deportation policy was unconstitutional. The risk to free speech rights is “palpable” when the government “decides to target people specifically with the threat of rounding them off the streets, throwing them into a detention center, and then potentially deporting them from this country,” DeCell says.
Though Rahman is safely abroad for now, she says she’s watching the CITR lawsuit closely. Ultimately, she says, she believes it will determine whether researchers will be able to continue to do their work, “which is to take social media platforms to account,” she says—“making sure there’s actual accountability and independent oversight is critical to protecting our democracies.”
About The Author
