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State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship'
- typpilol 10mo agoIs fact checker an actual job?
- lexicality 10mo agoYes, there are many situations where it would be illegal or detrimental to publish falsehoods, so people are implied to check facts.
- pjc50 10mo agoNow it's turning into a situation where it's illegal or detrimental to publish the truth.
- bigiain 10mo agoOnly the wrong sort of truth. It"s a stepping stone on the way to make it illegal to refuse to publish the "right" sort of lies.
- nephihaha 10mo agoBig press outlets have been publishing fibs of one kind and a other since as long as I can remember. A certain Australian's newspapers have had problematic statements in them for decades.
- ben_w 10mo ago> problematic This is so vague as to be meaningless. Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light. To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip. (If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)
- nephihaha 10mo agoThat isn't "vague", it's a way that I can express disdain without opening myself up to legal repercussions. A lot of dubious content appears in mainstream media, usually to push people in whichever direction that media desires. I catch YouTube doing it all the time, it's always trying to pull me in one direction or another (often ones I disagree with or am not interested in). American mainstream media focusses far too much on personality politics rather than substance. It rarely questions the political binary either, and offers only tokenistic representation to any positions outside it. There are many issues and debates which are simply not mentioned on it. On the migration issue, I have found that coverage tends to one extreme or the other — i.e. the open door or the closed door — when the probable solution is somewhere in between IMHO.
- mlrtime 10mo agoCan you point to a law that states it's illegal to publish the truth?
- input_sh 10mo agoIn serious news organizations, absolutely. Journalists write the stories, fact checkers make sure every claim is backed up by evidence before it gets published. To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.
- nephihaha 10mo agoI see errors all the time in mainstream media. Sometimes these appear from some kind of info file that they raid every time they have to look up a subject, so the same information is quoted again and again (even if inaccurate). A lot of things in life are subjective and open to interpretation, especially when it comes to politics and culture.
- input_sh 10mo agoMainstream != serious. In fact it's quite the opposite, as serious news organizations cannot match the output of mainstream news. Even one story per month is a success for many. In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another. Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process, otherwise you'd be sued out of existence pretty quickly. Of course, having a rigorous process doesn't mean you won't get sued at all, but there's a term for that: SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). In those lawsuits, the goal is not to prove the story wrong, but to just waste news org's resources on defending their reporting in front of a judge instead of doing their job.
- nephihaha 10mo agoI'll use a non-American example. Such outlets present themselves as more serious than they are, particularly the BBC. The BBC presents itself as neutral, for example, when it is no such thing in many areas. When it comes to British foreign policy or the Royal Family, its biases are clear. The BBC tried to bury the Prince Andrew story repeatedly. I pointed out to someone that the BBC was institutionally biased against Scottish independence, just by the nature of its funding. The BBC is funded by the TV licence, and if Scotland became independent, then the BBC would immediately lose 10% of its potential funding. Other media outlets are the same. The question is who owns them, and how are they funded. State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble (as happened in Israel a few years ago when Netanyahu shut theirs down). Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners. We have seen unions play less and less of a role in the political arena, probably partly because large profit-making corporations don't want them to be publicised.
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- efitz 10mo agoThis makes me happy. What would make me even more happy is if we linked our foreign policy, especially our trade and aid policies, to align with our Constitution. Other governments can do what they want, but we should prefer to interact with governments that share our values, and we should not reward or prefer governments that don’t.
- tjpnz 10mo agoAre you familiar with the First Amendment?
- seattle_spring 10mo ago> "Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it" Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.
- b112 10mo ago"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible" If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing. Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoIs this the foreign service officers or USCIS? iirc foreign service officers have pretty wide latitude on visa approval (whose really making sure they’re checking deeply?) and have 100 other more important factors to evaluate so if that’s the case; will this really amount to many denials?
- mullingitover 10mo agoExtremely on brand activity for a group of fraudsters who managed to lie their way into power via a firehose of misinformation.
- gusgus01 10mo agoWith the given topic, might be more accurate to describe the group of fraudsters as a group of fascists.
- mullingitover 10mo ago¿Por qué no los dos?
- StefanBatory 10mo agoThat's their goal. Nothing's true anymore, everything's permitted... And at one point they'll get you to a point where you are unable to tell what's true or false. So you stop caring. And they win; your apathy is what they need.
- SilverElfin 10mo agoThey’re also forcing visa applicants to share their social media publicly, like the authoritarian America is supposed to be better than: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/announcement-of-expanded-screening-and-vetting-for-h-1b-and-dependent-h-4-visa-applicants.html https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/a...
- sureglymop 10mo agoGuess I'm not getting in as someone having no social media. Not that I'd want to.
- SilverElfin 10mo agoMake a fake profile with basic AI generated fake content?
- account42 10mo agoYou can list your GitHub as your (only) social media. Has always worked for me so far without comment.
- hans_castorp 10mo agoI don't have any "social media" accounts. I guess they won't believe me, and would deny me a visa based on the assumption that I am lying.
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- fudged71 10mo agoThat's insane. I started Ask Me Anything on reddit, does being a moderator in that capacity mean I limited free speech of Americans?
- cosmicgadget 10mo agoDid you remove questions that were not about Rampart?
- intended 10mo agoAs nutty as it may seem - All moderation is part of the “censorship industrial complex”. Frankly this was inevitable. There is a reckoning that has been put off, within the groups that champion free speech. Mods happen to be the people who see how the sausage is made, but have no real ability to be heard. The Zeitgeist is still happy to say “censorship bad”, thus moderation bad. The work of ensuring “healthy” communities or debate is left to the magic of the “market place of ideas”. Except the market place is well and truly broken, captured and unfair for regular users. We have a dark forest for content consumers. This conversation needs to be had. Edit: tried to make the tone less frustrated.
- onjectic 10mo agoWe need to have a serious conversation about the pros and cons of anonymity on public online forums. It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication, most of us see the harm, but we also don’t want to swing towards mass surveillance(which is a very real risk). EDIT: By unnatural I am referring to not knowing who you are talking to, not knowing the slightest thing about them, our brains don’t process this aspect for what it is, instead we fill in this identity with our imaginations. Perhaps there was a better word for this than unnatural, but to me its especially unnatural because it doesn’t really occur in nature(at least not easily), where as communication across long distances or time happens all the time in nature. TLDR: It’s unnatural that we no longer even know if a comment was written by a human. EDIT2: I am not strongly in favor of removing anonymity from the internet. I don’t know what the answer is.
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- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoSource: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-orders-enhanced-vetting-applicants-h-1b-visa-2025-12-04/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-orders... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46151466)
- mborch 10mo agoWould be nice to see the actual wording in the cable, but I suppose Reuters are not allowed to publish that; we get a cable paraphrasing a cable.
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- ianks 10mo agoThe most ironic thing to me is the amount of coddling these self-purported “strong men” need. The idea that someone wouldn’t blindly accept what they say is enough to throw their egos into self-protection mode. Sad
- ktallett 10mo agoThe most snowflake of all is those who love using the term snowflake.
- nephihaha 10mo agoChuck Pahlaniuk then? He devised it.
- croon 10mo agoThe Wachowskis coined "red pill", that's not how it's used though.
- nephihaha 10mo agoThe pills originally come from Lewis Carroll, where Alice could change size by taking them. Jefferson Airplane used that metaphor to sing about psychedelics. The Matrix adapted Carroll's pill motif to represent an alteration in one's perceptions of reality. In the broad sense, yes, in the narrower sense, no. The Wachowskis themselves pulled from gnosticism, eastern religions etc. Pahlaniuk used the term "snowflake" to refer to people who were brittle and "not beautiful and unique" (his words from memory). He is/was a left wing anarchist.
- watwut 10mo agoI mean, that was free speech advocates and centrist (read pro-right but pretend not to) position position for years. Typical free speech advocate was considering criticism, fact checking and mockery of right to be attack on free speech for years now. Even in HN, you frequently seen the definition of free speech as "dont mind nazi speech and is actively helping nazi when they are in trouble". It never applied to nazi opposition.
- watwut 10mo agoThis is downvoted, but "defending Hitler" was a test for free speech defender for years on HN. Never ever it was "defend a feminist or progressive". Those were supposed to be shut up. Now the nazi are in government and free speech advocates are mostly silent. They focus on criticizing ... anyone except radical right wing.
- karlkloss 10mo agoThere's nothing more dangerous to dictatorships than the truth, so it's only logical.
- nephihaha 10mo agoSo called fact checking often is not about truth, but subjectivity.
- greggoB 10mo agoSo what is your proposed mechanism for attempting to maintain a commonly-observable reality? People have shown throughout history that they have an incentive to bend truths to suit their narratives, often to the detriment of society. How would you address this?
- mlrtime 10mo agoThe folks that are selectively using "facts" to push a narrative can continue to do so, The US DOS is not stopping them.
- greggoB 10mo agoI didn't quite get what you were saying here
- mlrtime 10mo agoThe fact checkers can continue to do what they are doing now, they just won't get a visa. They aren't being stopped from doing their job, just can't do it in the US. (Late reply, sorry)
- greggoB 10mo agoI get that your overall sentiment is fact-checkers aren't doing legitimate work, but I'm not sure if you see that the choice you describe can literally only reinforce that sentiment. If your opinion is that fact-checking as a concept is bad then that's one thing, but if not then I'd be interested to know what alternative(s) you'd suggest
- aprilthird2021 10mo agoNever thought dystopian novels would be so on the nose. I always thought they were being extra for the sake of art...
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- chmod775 10mo agoMildly amusing if true, but I can't help but notice that some things the article mentions, like "fact-checking", are never in fact a direct quote from the supposed memo. Is it so hard to reproduce the entire damn thing so readers can form their own opinion of what it says? How are we supposed to fact-check this!
- zombot 10mo agoForming your own opinion is so last-year. Now we have social media and AI to automate this.
- krapp 10mo ago@grok is this true?
- stogot 10mo agoI keep seeing this post on HN. Does this trigger some grok workflow only for the user or is it a joke?
- krapp 10mo agoIt's a joke. @ doesn't do anything on HN.
- machomaster 10mo agoIt works on Twitter, but not here on HN. It's a joke akin to commenting "Press X to doubt".
- StefanBatory 10mo agoI can form my own opinion on things I know about. If I don't, then it's natural that I will defer to those who I believe know better. Learning without thinking is useless but thinking without learning is dangerous.
- refurb 10mo ago
- ktallett 10mo agoThe land of the free and the home of the brave. Of course free, as long as you want to shoot school children, not if you want to openly express yourself. Brave as long as it's a defenceless third world country, terrified, if it is someone who is transgender or intersex or free thinking or compassionate or not Trump supporting or not Israel supporting..... And so on.
- nephihaha 10mo ago"Face checker" is such an Orwellian term, and right enough, in many cases, they are pushing subjective interpretations and their own biases for someone, rather than solid facts.
- robomartin 10mo agoThis entire thread is emblematic of the type of willful ignorance that seems to permeate certain HN discussions going back quite a few years. A full display of ignorant outrage for all to see. First, this dates back to MAY of this year. Nothing new. Second, it is obvious that nobody took the time to research, read the policy and understand it. Most comments are nonsense based on a complete lack of context. Finally, The restrictions apply to foreign nationals who are involved in: - Issuing or threatening legal action, such as arrest warrants, against US citizens or residents for social media posts made while they are physically present on US soil. So, any foreign official or person who threatens to, for example, arrest a US citizen based on what you post online WHILE YOU ARE IN THE US will be denied a visa. What's your objection to this? - Demanding that US tech platforms adopt content moderation policies or engage in censorship that extends beyond the foreign government's jurisdiction and affects protected speech in the US. Someone not from the US who tries to censor you in the US and beyond the limits of their own national jurisdiction will be denied a visa. Or, government officials in Peru demanding that HN prevent you from posting your drivel while in the US (outside their government's jurisdiction) will be denied a visa. What's your objection to this one? - Directing or participating in content moderation initiatives or "fact-checking" that the US administration considers a form of censorship of Americans' speech. Anyone that, from foreign soil, attempts to limit your right to free speech in the US while hiding under the "fact checking" or "content moderation" excuse will be denied a visa. Remember that your constitutional right of free speech in the US does not come with a fact-checking or content moderation limitation. As this thread easily demonstrates, you can post absolutely nonsense, lies and distortions and you would be protected. Fact-checking isn't a magical tool that allows someone to bypass constitutional rights to silence someone else. What's your problem with this? Of course, there are nuanced and not so nuanced elements to what constitutes free speech, where and under what circumstances. The key here is that outsiders don't get to mess with it or try to arrest you for this right you have in the US. If they do try, it's OK, they just can't get a visa to come here. Small price to pay. So, yeah, nothing to see here. This is actually good. It means someone who, from, for example, Poland, acts to affect your free speech rights in the US or have you arrested while you visit Europe for something you posted online while in the US will not be allowed to come into the US. Stop being lazy and ignorant. Take the time to research, read and understand before forming ideas and, worse, opening your mouth.
- outime 10mo agoI'm not commenting on US fact checkers but the concept made its way to my country of origin some time ago. As I suspected, it turned out to be completely biased, often ignoring or softening the controversial topics that affect their side. It's the same old journalism trick where they claim to be neutral and dedicated to the truth but in reality they all have their own agendas, which seems unavoidable (nowadays or since forever?). The main issue is people believing that their favorite fact checker is the most neutral and thus using their content as absolute truths. Glad to see that the concept is now completely unpopular in my country and we're back to the usual terrible journalism where there's no controversy in stating that.
- refurb 10mo agoMike Benz does a nice job of covering the US State department using this for political purposes in other countries. Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal. And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.
- littlecranky67 10mo agoSimilar observations here in Germany. Those fact checkers pick the facts that supports their agenda and leave out others. Framing is in place just the same. And it does not matter if you look at left or right journalists or left or right fact checkers, it is all the same.
- throwawayqqq11 10mo agoWhat agenda? Correcting desinfo is a legitimate goal and if you think there were errors made, well, fact check them. I dont like this 'agenda' labeling because its the exact opposite of a factual discourse, it implies malicious intent.
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- refurb 10mo agoAs far as I can tell from the Reuter’s article, the memo reads “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”. To me that seems like a good thing? But the very carefully placed quotes around censorship in the article makes it seem like it would be unfairly painting activities like fact checking as censorship? Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says?
- phatskat 10mo ago> Is it too much to ask for the exact wording of what the memo says? I’ll be curious to see this when it finally leaks too > “anyone involved in censorship of free speech”. To me that seems like a good thing? It seems like it until you remember that the current party in power considers things like a private business saying “we don’t tolerate hate speech” as infringing on free speech. At this point, the right uses “free speech” as a battle cry to shut down people who don’t agree with them. The government telling anyone they can’t have DEI practices, or forcing compliance with their views on what’s appropriate by withholding budget, or targeting citizens for their social media posts - these are actual free speech issues.
- refurb 10mo agoThe irony is you accuse the administration of applying the label too broadly, but not the people who cry “hate speech” and “DEI”. Why is that? We have examples of the latter like claiming Covid originated in China is “hate speech”.
- phatskat 10mo agoHate speech is a crime - suggesting a group of people, defined by some characteristic like race or gender, should be subject to violence, has been agreed to be dangerous for hopefully obvious reasons. If hate speech laws didn’t exist and the government tried to stifle that speech, that would be in violation of free speech. Not sure why you put DEI in as a free speech issue - unless you have some source to go along with the claim that it somehow violates free speech? > We have examples of the latter like claiming Covid originated in China is “hate speech”. I think we can both agree that suggesting something like that isn’t hate speech, and I think if there was violent rhetoric against Asian people being “blamed” for covid you’d have a different case on your hands - again, there’s no context for your claim so we can’t really discuss it beyond hypotheticals can we? > The irony is you accuse the administration of applying the label too broadly My point is the same people who complain about “free speech” when private companies kick the likes of Alex jones off of their platforms are more than happy to wield the power of the federal government to silence dissent or to force companies and universities to make difficult decisions between keeping funding or standing by the lie principles.
- frogperson 10mo agoTgis is straight up fascism. The united states is a facist country. I'm disgusted at how It turned so easily.
- red_Seashell_32 10mo agoWhat happened to Free Speech they are trying so hard to promote?
- nis0s 10mo agoThis move makes sense in the context of content moderation on social media forums. There are numerous forums where mods shape and influence culture and discourse, and often that discourse is geopolitical in nature. I don’t think HN necessarily counts as a forum where there’s censorship based along geopolitics.
- Beijinger 10mo ago[The message here is very clear: the people who make online communities safe are not welcome in the United States. Trust and safety is a very wide field, which encompasses the policies, processes, and technologies online platforms use to protect users from harm, ensure a secure environment, and maintain user trust. Compliance ensures that safety rules are adhered to. None of these activities constitute censorship.] I welcome this rule. In fact, I could imagine many more. I don't want people here that don't share our values.
- Beijinger 10mo agoI don't need former members of the NAZI Party. Nor Do I need people who want to live Sharia law. You want sharia law? Go home! And I don't need people that contradict our values.
- tim333 10mo agoIt's all a bit Orwellian really Ignorance is strength, facts are censorship.
- fleroviumna 10mo ago[dead]