“We will not be silenced”
Ahmed is hoping the appeals court will approve his request to stay the restraining order while weighing these questions that could impact technology research across the US.
In his appeal, he confirmed that he “does not intend to leave the United States or voluntarily submit to immigration detention while he seeks appellate review. He will remain with his American wife and children and continue to advocate for transparency and accountability for social media companies. Without a stay, he will do so under the immediate threat that the government may arrest and detain him at any time.”
Ahmed told Ars that he’s willing to risk temporary detention to protect technology researchers’ speech rights. But he thinks that “anyone with a passing familiarity with the US Constitution will be able to see this for what it is, which is the use of the awe-inspiring power of the US government to silence someone who has annoyed a friend of the administration, Mr. Musk.”
He said that he founded CCDH with the goal of making platforms safer for everyone after losing a colleague to a gunman radicalized online. About 90 percent of that work is simply testing if promised safeguards actually work, Ahmed told Ars. Despite the pressure from Trump officials, CCDH continues to flag defective safeguards. This fall, they’re preparing a report on safety on AI platforms that he confirmed will show that safeguards from firms, including OpenAI, aren’t working as they should.
“If the aim of the State Department or the tech overlords who’ve been celebrating this and no doubt urging them on from the beginning was to silence us, they failed,” Ahmed told Ars. “We will not back down,” he continued. “We will not be silenced.”
At home, his daughters are too young to understand how his work now threatens to break up their family. Seven years into CCDH’s monitoring of social media for harmful content, Ahmed told Ars that he remains dedicated to protecting Americans online and still hopes to become an American citizen one day. If necessary, he’ll take his fight to the Supreme Court.
“We have to show that we will not be cowed from this vital work, and it is vital,” he told Ars.
And while the focus isn’t completely on Musk, when it comes to X—which has come under fire globally after its chatbot Grok generated CSAM—Ahmed questioned why the Department of Justice hasn’t sparked their own probes based on his group’s and others’ reporting.
“I do think that DOJ should be focusing on a platform that is now proliferating and creating child sex abuse material rather than trying to punish the person who’s identifying the problem,” Ahmed told Ars.