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So it seems that the Trump administration has decided that having already proven its worth as a weapon of the Culture War in the deportation process of Hamas apologist Mahmoud Khalil and international Harvard students.
But this time, they will use it for freedom of speech, for US Americans specifically.
First, let me get out of the way that I like the US conception of free speech, generally, and agree with Yassine Meskhout that deporting even Hamas fanboys is wrong.
Second, I will notice that jurisdiction of speech acts in the internet is hard to define. If I tweet something offensive to country X while physically residing in country Y, then I think that country X generally has the right to coerce the relevant platform to remove that content, and if that fails coerce local ISPs to block that platform. I might or might not agree with their specifics (depending if it is CSAM or someone calling Kim Jong Un fat), but generally every jurisdiction does that. It is also not in dispute that some speech acts by someone in country X will lead to criminal proceedings against them in that country. Furthermore, as far as country X is concerned, it might reasonably care very little from where the offensive message was sent, as long as it was received in country X. If you send a bomb threat to the US, the US will very much not declare your act out of their jurisdiction just because you were not physically in the US when you did it.
As long as you stay out of country X and do not piss them off sufficiently to get extradited, this will not matter in practice. However, if you visit countries after you sent them speech which broke their local laws (e.g. using public social media posts), you should generally not be very surprised if they will judge your speech act by their laws.
Often, there might be higher standards than "the offensive message was receivable from country X". If you deny the Holocaust in Social Media in Korean while in South Korea, and later on travel to Germany, you will likely get away with it, because the impact of Korean tweets in Germany is generally very small. (If someone adds Germany subtitles to your Holocaust-denying TikTok, things might get messier.)
(Lest anyone thinks Germany is a special case, let me assure you that it is not. If you fuck with the Mouse through any speech act which violates their US copyright, or step on Elsevier's toes, you will have a bad time as soon as you set foot in the US.)
More problematic is the case when country X decides to either prosecute someone for a speech act which was done exclusively in country Y or leans on a platform to censor a speech act worldwide. But in the end, social media companies are generally international, and can decide for themselves in which countries they do business based on their bottom line. Nobody is stopping a pro-free-speech US company from telling country X, "fuck you, block us if you want, we are out of here".
With that out of the way, I think like all the Trump visa restrictions, this one is going to be incredibly petty. It will not change how officials will treat US platforms. I also predict that it will be applied more broadly than the stated "foreigner tries to censor US-only speech on US platform".
Exactly, seems like a 'sounds good, does nothing' action.
The Australian esafety commissioner is someone who might be affected, this is the class of person we're talking about. She almost certainly doesn't want to go to America. I've heard unprompted stories from this kind of highly-educated PMC govt worker about how much they don't want to go to Trump's America or America generally. It's not like they're going to be holding any big, prestigious censorship conferences in the US, that's a Davos/Europe thing.
Or Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the one Elon was fighting. Does he want to go to America? Absolutely not.
For a latin American elite, it is actually a bit implausible that he doesn’t want to go to America. It may not be his highest priority, but he almost certainly would like to go.
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