US State Dept. to use AI to Revoke Visas of Foreign Students who appear “pro-Hamas”

Axios has a story about how the State Department is launching a programme to review social media of foreign students to see if they are “pro-Hamas.” If they appear to support Hamas then they may get their visas revoked.

A senior official is quoted as saying “it would be negligent for the department that takes national security seriously to ignore publicly available information about [visa] applicants in terms of AI tools. … AI is one of the resources available to the government that’s very different from where we were technologically decades ago.”

There are obvious free-speech issues, but I also wonder at the use of AI to police speech. What will be policed next? Pro-EDI speech?

Thanks to Gary Marcus’ Substack for this.