Donald Trump’s war on the truth has taken many forms – spreading thousands of falsehoods, insulting journalists and suing news organizations.

It’s clear he desperately wants to control the message received by the public, and to have his version of reality go unchallenged, whether that’s about a “rigged” election or the decreased price of eggs.

Now there’s a new wrinkle, one that is likely to keep a lot of skilled workers from coming to the United States.

A few days ago, the state department – led by Trump’s appointee and close ally Marco Rubio – instructed staff to deny visas to international applicants who work on factchecking and content moderation.

In other words, crack down on those who try to make the internet safer, to point out lies and misinformation. Keep those workers out.

Applicants for H-1B visas are the first targets. Those visas usually are for highly skilled foreign workers, often in the tech industry.

If applicants have worked in the past on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking and similar topics, they simply aren’t welcome here. The Guardian described the effort as the latest of Trump’s recent moves to restrict legal immigration to the US by using state department powers to bar entry to anyone who, in Rubio’s words, would suppress free speech “essential to the American way of life”.

For the Trump administration, in other words, the work of fighting online misinformation is seen as anti-American censorship, contrary to the country’s free-speech ethos.

Convoluted? Certainly.

“The policy is incoherent and unconstitutional,” charged Carrie DeCell, an attorney and legislative expert at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“People who study misinformation … aren’t engaged in ‘censorship,’” she said in a statement. “They’re engaged in activities that the first amendment was designed to protect.”

And Alice Goguen Hunsberger, an anti-misinformation expert for major tech companies, told NPR that she was “alarmed that trust and safety work is being conflated with censorship”.

What’s really going on here?

It’s all part of a larger effort to weaken or restrict those who might hold Trump and his allies responsible for dangerous practices on the internet. More broadly, this topic predates Trump; rightwingers have long charged that they are targets of lefty censorship.

For Trump, of course, this is personal, as everything with him tends to be.

Recall that in early 2021, in the wake of his own online statements – about the supposedly “stolen election” that triggered the mobbing of the US Capitol on January 6 – he was permanently suspended from Twitter.

That evidently hurt. For years, Twitter had been his favorite place for bluster, bombast and straight-up lies. Other major social-media platforms locked him out too, at least for a while, and there were unsubstantiated charges that the platforms were colluding with Democrats.

When Elon Musk came along to buy Twitter and remake it as X – driving out many on the content-moderation team – he reinstated Trump, who by then had decamped to the ironically named Truth Social.

But the pain of being barred has clearly lingered.

Thus, Trump’s special animus toward content moderators, trust and safety teams, and factcheckers. It seems he didn’t forget the sting.

In January, the newly elected president touted “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship”.

“No longer will our government label the speech of our own citizens as misinformation or disinformation, which are the favorite words of censors,” Trump crowed in a speech via video conference to the World Economic Forum.

In his first-day flurry of executive orders, one of them prohibited the US government from “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen”. And it charged the attorney general with investigating the Biden administration’s supposed efforts to stem the flow of misinformation online. It said the AG should recommend “remedial actions”.

Yes, retribution lies at the heart of this crackdown.

“In the past, the president himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts,” a state department spokesperson said in a statement last week. “He does not want other Americans to suffer this way. Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people.”

Somehow, I doubt Trump is fretting about possible harm to anyone except himself. This isn’t about protecting citizens and it isn’t about censorship.

It’s about keeping the truth – and those who are skilled at protecting it – at a safe distance, far from American shores.

• Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture