TWITTER RAPS US POLICY ON DISCLOSURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFO

Twitter Inc, Reddit and a group representing major internet firms have backed two documentary film groups that challenged the Trump administration’s 2019 rules requiring nearly all US visitors to disclose social media user information from the prior five years.

In court papers filed on Thursday (Friday, May 29, 2020 in Manila), the social media sites and the Internet Association, representing Facebook, Amazon.com, Alphabet and others, said the rules force foreign nationals “to surrender their anonymity in order to travel to the US” and “chill a vast quantity of speech and associational activity.” The State Department rules require disclosure of all social media handles used over the prior five years by US visa applicants, including ones under pseudonyms, on 20 platforms.

David Shepardson said in an exclusive written for Reuters that the Doc Society and the International Documentary Association filed suit in US District Court in Washington, D.C., in December. They said they regularly collaborate with non-US filmmakers and warn that visitors must “consider the risk that a US official will misinterpret their speech on social media, impute others’ speech to them, or subject them to additional scrutiny or delayed processing because of the views they or their contacts have expressed.”

The latest filing comes amid an escalating feud between President Donald Trump and tech companies. Twitter on Friday hid a Trump tweet behind a warning for the first time. It came hours after Trump signed an executive order threatening Silicon Valley social media firms with new free speech regulations, after Twitter added a fact-checking tag to two previous tweets.