The State Department is instructing staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration calls “censorship” of Americans’ speech.
The internal memo, sent Tuesday and first reported by Reuters (NPR also obtained a copy), focuses on H-1B visas for highly skilled workers — a category commonly used by tech companies. It directs consular officers to pursue findings of ineligibility if they “uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States.”
The guidance cites a policy announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May restricting visas for “foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans.” It singles out H-1B applicants in part “as many work in or have worked in the tech sector, including in social media or financial services companies involved in the suppression of protected expression.”
Consular officers are told to “thoroughly explore” applicants’ work histories by reviewing resumes, LinkedIn profiles and media mentions for activities including combating misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.
Critics say the memo conflates routine trust-and-safety work with censorship and undermines efforts to keep people safe online. Alice Goguen Hunsberger, who has worked in trust and safety at companies including OpenAI and Grindr, said the field includes “critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material],” as well as preventing fraud, scams and sextortion. She warned that removing global expertise from those teams would leave Americans less safe.
First Amendment experts also criticized the guidance. Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney and legislative advisor at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said people who study misinformation and work on content moderation “aren’t engaged in ‘censorship’ — they’re engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect,” calling the policy “incoherent and unconstitutional.”
A State Department spokesperson, declining to comment on “allegedly leaked documents,” said the administration defends Americans’ freedom of expression “against foreigners who wish to censor them” and does not support “aliens coming to the United States to work as censors muzzling Americans.” The statement referenced President Trump’s own past experience being banned from social platforms and framed the policy as protecting Americans from similar harms.
The guidance comes amid broader administration scrutiny of tech companies’ content policies. President Trump and other officials have repeatedly criticized platforms for moderating speech, pointing to his 2021 account suspensions after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as evidence of anti-conservative bias, even as many companies have loosened some moderation policies under political pressure.
Separately, the State Department announced it will require H-1B visa applicants and their dependents to set social media profiles to public so U.S. officials can review them. NPR reporters Bobby Allyn and Michele Kelemen contributed reporting.