“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of s***.” This is the kind of statement that Meta will no longer be flagging as hate speech on their Facebook and Instagram platforms, according to policies announced in a leaked document circulated by the company days before the inauguration of Donald Trump. The policies are supposedly necessary because classifying such statements as hate speech is, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “out of touch with mainstream discourse”.
This change in what constitutes “mainstream” speech was necessary to prepare the ground for Trump’s new immigration policies, and it signals a convenient and profitable arrangement between those who control data and those who control borders. The alignment was clearly visible on inauguration day, where Big Tech CEOs, the so-called broligarchy, were guests of honour after having made substantial donations to Trump’s campaign.
But Big Tech offering its services to support brutal immigration policies is not a new phenomenon. Since well before Trump, the US government has been partnering with tech companies to build an extensive surveillance apparatus that can target not just immigrants, but anybody.
Instead of relying solely on data it can lawfully collect itself, the government has supplemented those records with information it buys from data brokers, who provide extensive profiles on just about anyone’s demographic, consumer, location, health, educational, insurance and financial data — whether it is data captured by your phone, your car, or your utility meter.
Companies like Palantir, Amazon, Salesforce and others have offered their services to integrate all those disparate sources of information into tools that can be used to target immigrants. Among the services the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is actively seeking is what it calls “predictive analytics and modeling”. It is estimated that since 2020, ICE and other related agencies have spent almost $7.8bn through 15,000 contracts with 263 private corporations on immigration-related technologies.
Since 2004, the US government has also been investing more resources in “e-carceration”, which includes technologies like ankle bracelets. In 2018, ICE partnered with BI Inc to create SmartLINK, a phone app that focuses on monitoring as a “humane” alternative to detention. Despite its claims to privacy, however, independent reports describe how SmartLINK collects all sorts of sensitive data, including “facial images, voice prints, medical information, pregnancy and births”.
The government has also collected a massive amount of immigrants’ DNA as part of a project started during Trump’s first term, but continued by Joe Biden. The authorities claim the data will help them solve future crimes committed by migrants, even though official statistics show that, on average, immigrants commit fewer offences than US-born citizens.
The role of Big Tech in implementing the US’s immigration policy will only expand under Trump’s second term. The president has wasted no time in making good on his campaign promises, issuing a number of executive orders that are already transforming immigration policy.
These orders are aimed to end birthright citizenship, extend raids to “sanctuary” areas like schools and churches, prosecute citizens who refuse to collaborate with authorities, end the release of immigrants while they await decisions on their cases, cancel all asylum appointments, and expand the pool of undocumented individuals subject to fast-track deportation – among other measures.
Trump’s executive orders can be contested in courts. Which is why legitimising hate speech in the public sphere is key: it can secure their mainstream approval and thus discourage legal challenges. That is where Big Tech companies are set to play a big role, thanks to their hijacking of free speech.
“Free speech”, when unilaterally wielded by the powerful, can be a form of censorship, a weapon of oppression and destruction. We saw this in Myanmar in 2017, and we are seeing it in Palestine today. In these cases and others, companies like Meta and X have played an active role in using technology to promote speech that demonises vulnerable groups, opening the door to physical acts of violence against them.
The combination of extremist politics and corporate technologies at the service of anti-immigrant rhetoric — as well as anti-Black, anti-women, anti-LGBTQ and anti-Muslim rhetoric — will make for an incendiary public sphere over the next few years. Myanmar did not humble Big Tech; it assured it of the kind of power it could brandish.
This is why companies like Meta and X are now doing the opposite of what it would take to prevent something like that from happening again (in terms of moderation, safety and privacy), and are making that power available to Trump, as we saw in Springfield, Ohio, where social media fuelled an anti-immigrant craze ahead of the US presidential election.
Confronting this problem is not simply a matter of acquiring the media literacy skills necessary to fight the disinformation that circulates on Facebook or X. In a post-truth, post-literacy world, everyone on these platforms understands that the narrative with the most “likes” or “shares” wins, and becomes reality — at least for them. Users will not stop being attracted to living in those fantasies, given the harshness of the real world. And those who control the algorithms behind the scenes will not give up that power easily, either.
While it is convenient to blame Trump and his supporters for the disasters that are about to unfold in the immediate future, it is important to remember that the Democrats have largely supported the neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatisation that allowed the broligarch class to emerge in the first place.
Given that neither party is able to articulate a viable political agenda for the protection of basic human rights for immigrants, resistance must emerge at local levels. This can be done by challenging illegal deportations in local courts, opposing disinformation through local media, and strengthening the links between local, national and international civic organisations. It is encouraging to see cities, villages, churches and schools continuing to adopt sanctuary policies, refusing to cooperate with the federal government in the enforcement of xenophobic policies, even as they are being threatened by Trump’s executive orders.
Opposition will become harder to enact in the face of an all-knowing klepto-fascist state backed by the wealthiest men in the world, men who acquired their power by masterminding a colonial data grab. As we watch GenAI continue this plunder, we must reject colonialism’s foundational lie: that when it comes to access to the world’s resources, might makes right. The welfare of immigrants, and indeed the welfare of all of us, depends to a large extent on whether we can collectively reclaim the power to dictate what data is collected from us, and for what purpose we want to use this resource.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
