Feed: Slashdot
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Title: US Will Ban Foreign Officials To Punish Countries For Social Media
Rules

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/28/20121...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Secretary of State Marco
Rubio announced Wednesday that the U.S. would restrict visas for "foreign
nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the
United States." He called it "unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or
threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media
posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil" and "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." It's not yet clear how or
against whom the policy will be enforced, but seems to implicate Europe's
Digital Services Act, a law that came into effect in 2023 with the goal of
making online platforms safer by imposing requirements on the largest
platforms around removing illegal content and providing transparency about
their content moderation. Though it's not mentioned directly in the press
release about the visa restrictions, the Trump administration has slammed the
law on multiple occasions, including in remarks earlier this year by Vice
President JD Vance. The State Department's homepage currently links to an
article on its official Substack, where senior advisor for the Bureau of
Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Samuel Samson critiques the DSA as a tool
to "silence dissident voices through Orwellian content moderation." He adds,
"Independent regulators now police social media companies, including
prominent American platforms like X, and threaten immense fines for non-
compliance with their strict speech regulations." "We will not tolerate
encroachments upon American sovereignty," Rubio says in the announcement,
"especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental
right to free speech."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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