By Tyler Lilly – Staff Reporter

The Department of Homeland Security recently issued subpoenas to various social media companies, such as Google (YouTube), Reddit, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and Discord for personal user information. The subpoenas are specifically in response to recent ICE pushback and criticism, and will reveal the identity of anti-ICE accounts to the government. Subpoenas have been issued by the government in the past for seeing criminal activity on social media accounts that engage in highly illegal activity such as human trafficking, but this is not the same. The DHS sent a subpoena to Meta in November to get the name, phone number, and email address of an Instagram account that reposted a video naming an ICE agent. The subpoenas issued by the DHS violate first amendment rights to free speech, and should not be complied with.

People should be able to be political online anonymously, provided they aren’t breaking any laws. Many people have families that disapprove of certain views, and outing accounts speaking out against the government could have significant social repercussions for those people, which could include losing their jobs. If anonymity is attacked, it could also lead to significantly less people being honest about their political views online, making it look like more supporters of ICE and the DHS than there actually are.

Silencing dissent and opposing views is also a slippery slope to go down. If freedom of speech is attacked online and the DHS gets away with it, what is stopping them from destabilizing it in other ways? Any attack on freedom of speech is a very bad route for the United States to be going down. The U.S. has some of the least-limiting speech laws in the world. If the government starts eroding online free speech, does the first amendment even apply anymore?

The recent actions of ICE should also be criticized, especially the recent killing of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti. Pretti was at a protest, intervening when ICE agents were pushing nearby demonstrators, and he stepped between the agent and the protestors. Pretti was pepper sprayed, pinned to the ground, had his gun withdrawn, and was shot ten times. The killing was certainly not legal, and is still being investigated. If the DHS forcing social media companies to expose people who speak out against things like this is, quite frankly, deplorable in every way. 

The only argument in favor of this is that subpoenas allow the DHS to identify people making threats to safety, but that is always something they have been able to do. Nobody has a problem with the DHS requesting the identity of an account that made a bomb threat, for example. The first amendment does not extend to threats of harm, but it does protect political speech.

The DHS issuing subpoenas to identify anti-ICE social media accounts is a very slippery slope. It silences important voices, limits information about ICE, and violates the right to free political speech. It is a disgusting abuse of power, and goes against what the country stands for.