Politics Home | British Campaigner Threatened With US Deportation Says “Tendrils Of Big Tech” Have Reached Westminster

Imran Ahmed and No10 Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney set up the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2018 (Alamy)

7 min read14 January

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the British-American non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), has a green card visa, which allows him to live in Washington DC with his wife and child. On Christmas Eve, the US State Department announced visa sanctions and entry bans against Ahmed and several other European campaigners, accusing them of coercing American social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose – an allegation Ahmed rejected.

Just after midnight on Christmas Day, a judge granted a temporary restraining order preventing the US government from arresting or removing him while the case proceeds, and there will now be months of legal briefings and hearings to determine his future.

Ahmed said he believes that big tech has been undermining efforts to regulate technology in the US, and this influence has now widely spread to the UK and Europe. He told PoliticsHome that he views the threat to deport him from the US as a product of that pressure.

“This is entirely about big tech, big money, and its effect on Washington,” he said.

“There is no doubt at all that the tendrils of big tech have spread into Westminster and Brussels.

“We are seeing a growing number of odd groups springing up, proselytising complete deregulation of technology and echoing odd, very American libertarian talking points about how any attempt to restrain or place rules on tech businesses will lead to the end of days.”

Ahmed sees Elon Musk’s platform, X, and the content created and shared via its AI chatbot, Grok, as the worst example of the harms of big tech.

Governments around the world have criticised X’s AI chatbot Grok after it produced potentially illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and sexualised images of adults without their consent.

Since Tuesday, Grok began ignoring instructions to generate sexualised images of women in swimwear or in sexual poses, after the Keir Starmer UK government announced that the new criminal offence of creating an intimate image of an adult without consent will be brought into force this week under the Data (Use and Access) Act.

Meanwhile, the communications watchdog Ofcom has launched an official investigation into the platform. Ahmed, however, believes that Ofcom has been slow to act against X, which has demonstrated it “is not fit for purpose as a digital regulator in the United Kingdom”. 

He accused the regulator of repeatedly failing to use the powers granted to it under the Online Safety Act, leaving the public exposed to serious harms while major platforms escape scrutiny.

“Regulation of AI platforms and having clear rules on chatbots is vital in the UK,” Ahmed said.

“Ofcom has been entirely cowardly throughout the two years that it’s had the powers that it’s had.

“It took CCDH’s campaigning and me going out there and repeatedly saying to the Home Affairs Select Committee, to politicians, to the media, that Ofcom had opened 21 investigations into 69 websites, and not one was a major platform.”

PoliticsHome has contacted Ofcom for comment.

Ofcom also announced an investigation into illegal terror and hate content on a major social media platform in December, following CCDH’s research that identified the role that X played in the turbo-charging of anti-semitism after the synagogue attack in Manchester, as reported by PoliticsHome. 

PoliticsHome understands CCDH is conducting further research into harmful material produced by Grok, with findings expected within the next couple of weeks.

According to Ahmed, the safety failures around AI image generation should have been obvious from the outset: “It’s the first thing you’d think about if you were thinking about safety at a systemic level, and you deal with it… What he’s shown is that even the most basic, obvious safety feature is not in place.”

Asked whether politicians should now leave X altogether, Ahmed declined to issue a blanket instruction, saying it was “a decision that every politician has to make for themselves”. CCDH itself left the platform when X changed its terms of service to make Texas the governing jurisdiction after losing a lawsuit against CCDH in California. 

“What Elon Musk has been scared of all the way through is transparency,” Ahmed said.

“There’s this obvious question, then, what is he hiding? And we all know now what he’s hiding is that his platform became the go-to for anti-semites, and when he launched Grok, it became the go-to for paedophiles. This is the Musk philosophy in action.”

He batted away accusations that there has been a lack of political will from the UK government itself to deal with X and its owner, describing the government’s response as “robust”. Ahmed remains in contact with No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, with whom he initially set up CCDH in 2018 to target online antisemitism.

While he continues to campaign on tech regulation, Ahmed’s own future in the US remains uncertain. He had his first court hearing last Monday, in the same New York courthouse on the same day as Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.

There will now be legal briefings until 11 March, followed by a further hearing. Months of written submissions are expected before a judge makes a broader ruling on whether the US government can lawfully strip Ahmed of his residency.

Ahmed said he had assembled an “incredible legal team” before Christmas, anticipating that such a move was possible.

“It’s a really important case, because this is fundamentally about the First Amendment,” he said, referring to the US amendment which protects freedom of speech and freedom to protest.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat; no one in America wants a government to be able to punish people for their speech or advocacy.”

Ahmed was keen to stress that he does not see the case as driven by partisan politics, or by Donald Trump personally.

“It’s really important to be clear that from our perspective, this has nothing to do with the Trump administration,” he said.

“I’ve worked with the Trump administration before. I’ve appeared on stage with [Mike] Pompeo, with [Benjamin] Netanyahu, with [Michael] Gove, working on anti-semitism. The Trump administration gave me my Extraordinary Ability visa.

“This is about big tech, big money, and the really deleterious effect it’s having in Washington DC.”

He described his case as resulting from “one of the dumbest cultural debates of the last five years”: censorship on social media.

“People have been screaming censorship about everything that they can, and Elon Musk literally has called transparency legislation from the European Commission censorship,” he said.

“This is how stupid and dilatory the concept of censorship has become, and it’s time for us to get back to brass tacks. Real censorship is what we’re seeing right now.”

Despite his friendship with McSweeney, Ahmed said he does not expect or want intervention from the UK government in his case.

“This is being done by the US State Department,” he said, “and I’m going to fight this in the US courts and assert my US constitutional rights.”

CCDH has said that despite the risk of deportation for Ahmed, it will continue “doing crucial work to combat online antisemitism, protect children from online harms, and hold tech companies accountable and responsible for the problematic content on their platforms”.