The new dark age of censorship

And how to beat it

On June 11, a 21-year-old Norwegian tourist was denied entry to the U.S. after immigration officials searched his phone.

The Department of Homeland Security would later claim they found a photo that indicated past drug use. But the tourist alleged it was because of a meme making fun of JD Vance.

In either case, it’s clear the Trump administration is taking a radical new approach to monitoring the speech and social media activity of potential visitors. Last week, the State Department announced that all student visa applicants must adjust the privacy settings on their social media profiles to “public” so that they can be vetted. According to Reuters, Marco Rubio “has revoked the visas of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, including students, because they got involved in activities that he said went against U.S. foreign policy priorities.”

Some of the stories are downright Orwellian. Read this account from an Australian writer: How my reporting on the Columbia protests led to my deportation.

They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.

Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)

Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”

[Read the whole thing.]

And the speech policing of foreign visitors — which, to be clear, is in itself unacceptable and un-American — is just the tip of the iceberg. The looming mass of the White House’s censorship campaign is harder to see. And even darker.

The iceberg of government censorship

Here is an incomplete list of ongoing attempts to run roughshod over the First Amendment:

Weaponized Federal Trade Commission investigations. Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog, has filed suit alleging that the FTC is attempting to punish them for reporting “that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X.” Even if politicized investigations, as expected, lead nowhere, the weight of government retaliation can chill reporting, harm fundraising, and tie Trump critics up in expensive and time-consuming legal processes. (Also worth noting: The FTC launched this retaliatory investigation after Trump illegally attempted to fire the two Democratic commissioners without cause. Protect Democracy and co-counsel are suing on their behalf.)

Using regulatory powers to coerce legacy media. Before the election, CBS’ 60 Minutes interviewed Kamala Harris. Donald Trump apparently did not like the interview. So he sued, demanding $20 billion (with a “b”) in damages. The lawsuit is laughable — but here’s the thing: CBS’ corporate owner, Paramount, is currently seeking federal approval for a merger. The lawsuit appears to be nothing short of a “meritless” presidential shakedown of the owners of a highly trusted news show. But CBS News’ president and 60 Minutes’ executive producer have both now resigned, implying that corporate interference in response had impeded the outlet’s independence. Meanwhile, Paramount’s primary concern, per the Wall Street Journal, is a legal settlement “exposing directors and officers to liability in potential future shareholder litigation or to criminal charges for bribing a public official.” (The California State Senate has opened an inquiry.)

Investigations of religious groups for faith-based activities. The House Committee on Homeland Security is investigating more than 200 NGOs, including many religious groups, for allegedly being “involved in providing services or support to inadmissible aliens during the Biden-Harris administration’s historic border crisis.” Targets include the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Charities USA, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Read more: Trump’s next move to silence free speech is coming

Deploying the Federal Communications Commission to harass the media. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump loyalist, the FCC has become a major weapon of censorship, per Sam Gustin, “by threatening their broadcast licenses and launching sham investigations into their business practices and diversity programs.” So far, Carr has threatened PBS, NPR, MSNBC, and others. Their violations? Failing to present the news as Carr sees it, and providing coverage of the federal government’s activity.

Direct attacks from the White House. Under Trump, the White House has taken over control of the press pool from the White House Correspondents Association, banned the AP from events for its continued use of the term “Gulf of Mexico,” and routinely targeted individual reporters and outlets. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, Trump has lobbed social media attacks on the media on average once a day for the last 10 years. Here’s an example of what this looks like, from this week:

The hidden goal behind an overt censorship campaign

You can think of censorship as an iceberg because of the logic behind it. As much as this is all out in the open, the White House isn’t actually aiming for censorship that you can see.

Yes, I’m sure Trump would like to coerce the AP into using the term “Gulf of America” and he’d like to punish CNN for accurate reporting that was politically inconvenient for him. But the main targets aren’t CBS and NPR — or, for that matter, Norwegian tourists.

The White House’s real aim is self-censorship by everyone else. Everyone in the United States and around the world — in the media and online — who is watching these censorship attempts. The goal is to get us all to temper our speech in response.

In a country as big, diverse, and lawyered-up as the United States, Trump and his allies in Congress, the FCC, FTC, and the Department of Homeland Security cannot practically police everyone’s speech (at least for now). There are too many of us and too few of them.

So instead, they’re looking for anticipatory obedience.

• By making an example of Paramount and CBS, they’re hoping to get other corporate owners across the country to proactively intervene to temper reporting across various outlets.

• By singling out the AP on something of little import, they’re looking to make smaller, less-resourced publications more afraid to challenge the White House on more significant issues.

• By targeting massive faith-based groups, they’re trying to get other, more vulnerable nonprofits to scale back First Amendment-protected activities that the White House disagrees with.

• By relentlessly attacking individual journalists, they’re looking to get editors to reflexively tweak coverage to be friendlier to the president.

• By making an example of visa applicants’ social media, they’re hoping to make everyone — anywhere on Earth — more reluctant to criticize Donald Trump, either online or off.

None of that we can see. Self-censorship is, by nature, invisible. Heck, in some cases, it may even happen unconsciously (I know I reflexively think twice before posting anything online these days).

And so I’m afraid it could be much more rampant than any of us realize.

How to overcome this new age of censorship

There are five strategies to overcome this grave crisis of free speech, but they pretty much all boil down to one thing: Flip the iceberg. Take the big dark mass of self-censorship and try to do exactly the opposite.

1. Fight back at every opportunity. Anticipatory obedience relies on a domino effect, the visible submission of individual targets one-by-one. That’s why it’s so critical that key targets — the AP, Media Matters, NPR — have all fought back vigorously and aggressively, even at considerable risk. In doing so, they’re effectively holding the line for all of us.

2. Unite in the face of efforts to divide and censor. As with all things, collective action is the only way. When the administration and its allies attempt to pick off individual targets, other actors need to come to their defense across sectors and ideology. And that doesn’t just apply to other media outlets: Civil society, business interests, elected officials, philanthropy, unions, and more all need to join in. (For example, it’s notable that the WSJ editorial board — which often leans conservative — is encouraging Paramount to stand strong.)

3. Celebrate those who refuse to be censored — and raise the cost of capitulation. When the targets of censorship refuse to back down, have their back and find ways to support them, whether that’s a donation or a public statement or even just a private note. Similarly, when you see important actors bowing down to censorship, call them out — and make sure to factor it into your own choices around who and what to support, financially and otherwise.

4. Proactively support diverse and unflinching press coverage. Go out of your way to reward outlets, commentators, nonprofits, and others who refuse to be intimidated. That could be a paid subscription or a follow or just a supportive email complimenting a reporter on a hard-hitting story. (If you’re looking for newsrooms to support, I recommend the Institute for Nonprofit News’ FindYourNews.org tool.)

5. Get reflexively louder and *more* critical. Every criticism of those in power makes a censorship campaign less likely to succeed. Every person using their First Amendment rights helps to protect them for everyone. (Like I said, they can’t actually censor all of us.)

So go ahead, post the meme.

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Don’t lose faith in the law

I don’t have a lot to say about the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on nationwide injunctions this morning — or about the similarly unconscionable emergency docket order earlier this week on third-country deportations. For a helpful legal read, I recommend this piece by Ilya Somin:

Today's 6-3 Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Casa, Inc. barring nationwide injunctions is a grave mistake. It risks allowing the executive to engage in large-scale violations of constitutional rights, potentially in perpetuity. Exactly how bad it is depends on the extent to which other remedies might fill the gap left by the elimination of nationwide injunctions.

But here’s what I’m reminding myself today:

The courts were never going to save our democracy. The Constitution and the rule of law are much bigger and more important than any individual courtroom, including the Supreme Court. Yes, these things matter — a lot — but they are just one part of a much larger and fundamentally political struggle between autocracy and freedom. The task of preserving democracy now comes down to all of us, as citizens. It always has. No court ruling changes that.

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What else we’re tracking:

• A federal judge ordered the administration to restore millions in canceled grants to University of California researchers, calling the cuts illegal and unconstitutional. Read more about why fighting back was their only option: Universities have no choice.

• Federalized National Guard troops in Southern California have now been deployed as part of routine drug busts 130 miles east of Los Angeles. Legal scholar Liza Goitein explains in Just Security why this is such an “alarming escalation.”

• The Supreme Court allowed Protect Democracy’s lawsuit challenging Virginia's unlawful voter ban to proceed. The case will go to trial this fall. Read about how Virginia has been unlawfully disenfranchising voters for over a century here.

• The administration is continuing to expand its unprecedented effort to consolidate sensitive data about Americans held by states, reports NPR. Says Nicole Schneidman: “Once this kind of data is in the wrong hands and in particular is aggregated, it can be used for an incredibly broad ranging set of purposes." (Background here: DOGE’s data “panopticon” pales compared to what’s next.)