A group of international tech experts filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging a sweeping policy targeting social media regulators that resulted in the Trump administration’s decision to bar five prominent European scholars from entering the United States last year.
The lawsuit is another escalation in the standoff between the Trump administration and European officials, who have pushed for stronger regulation of American social media companies, citing rising misinformation and hate speech on platforms such as Facebook and X.
It seeks to overturn a State Department policy that threatened deportations and travel bans on experts studying those trends, after the Trump administration asserted that their work amounted to a form of online censorship that targeted conservatives.
In the complaint filed on Monday, lawyers representing the Coalition for Independent Technology Research — an organization focused on the social impact of technology — wrote that the policy was dangerously vague. They added that the decision to deny entry to five leading European experts in December was designed to chill speech across the larger fields of disinformation research, fact-checking and content moderation.
“The administration has clearly found a hammer that it quite likes to suppress speech that it doesn’t like, and that is the threat of detention and deportation,” said Carrie DeCell, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which is helping represent the group.
“It has used that hammer in other contexts, with respect to student and faculty protesters, and now it’s using it in the context of researchers who study and advocate for changes on the social media platforms,” she said.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he was restricting visas from foreign nationals whose calls for global content moderation policies, he said, amounted to “flagrant censorship actions.” Mr. Rubio said the policy was designed to protect the rights of American users on the platforms.
In December, the State Department waded into a brewing dispute between European regulators and companies, including Elon Musk’s X platform, as well as Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta, by invoking the policy against five prominent individuals.
In a move that stirred outrage in Europe, Mr. Rubio barred the heads of major research and regulatory initiatives based in France, Germany, the United Kingdom from entering the United States.
They included Thierry Breton, a French citizen and former member of the European Commission.
Mr. Rubio also sought to bar Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization that tracks hate speech online. Mr. Musk unsuccessfully sued the organization in 2023 after it reported that X had failed to curb a surge of hate speech. A federal judge temporarily blocked the government from deporting Mr. Ahmed in December.
The lawsuit echoes a similar case last year that focused on the State Department’s use of immigration law to target students it had identified as visible leaders of campus protests against Israel. A federal judge in Boston ruled last year that Mr. Rubio and others had violated the students’ free speech rights, seeking to make an example of a handful of prominent pro-Palestinian activists in an attempt to silence dissent at American universities more broadly.
In the social media fight, lawyers from Knight Institute and Protect Democracy, a legal nonprofit that is also representing the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, wrote that the administration had “cynically and falsely” claimed it was fighting censorship while itself attempting to censor urgent research.
“To the contrary,” they wrote, “when independent researchers and advocates study the internet platforms or express their views about the content moderation policies of those platforms, and when the platforms’ employees work to develop or enforce those policies, they are engaged in private expressive activity that the First Amendment protects.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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