U.S. will review social media for foreign student visa applications

Universities in the US are currently advising students (F or J visa) to not travel out of US to avoid potential challenges at the port of re-entry.

Unfortunately that's the goal. Your call and I respect that, but the current administration doesn't care, they want folks who they determine have the wrong point of view out.

It's not just international students either, in their demand to Harvard the Trump administration demanded Harvard hire an outside group to survey Harvard staff and STUDENTS for "viewpoint diversity" and if they felt the diversity wasn't what the administration wanted, adjust staff and students to fit their view.

Yeah, I wonder how this is checked/enforced as well, it doesn't seem trivial and especially in the time at entry. Is it something they take action over retroactively, after correlating records from multiple companies?

Does/should one have freedom of speech if they are a non-citizen and not in the US yet? If so, should the US police around the world to ensure that?

So you missed out in your history lessons. It were always the students and philosophers/authors who were critical in regime unrest. Nowadays you can add filmmakers, but you can easily control them with budgets.

Because ideology railroads economy. If you take a look at fascist regimes throughout history, you will undoubtedly get a feel for their cruelty. But what most people miss is their incompetence. They're self-destructive by nature. Emotionally-driven by their ideology.

There's a metro station in Bucharest, Romania that's noticeably smaller than the rest. It was built in secret by the workers. The administration didn't want it built at all - it was by the University, and they believed students should be forced to walk, lest they become lazy. Luckily, the workers had the foresight to build the station in secret for some unknown future date. Now, it's one of the most used stations in the Capital.

Conservatives hate academia. They say this repeatedly and publicly. Their goal is to destroy the existing academic system and replace it with an ideological system focused on a particular set of right wing values.

The idea that academia makes money for the US, or brings in highly educated people to contribute to our economy, or produces scientific advancements that improve society is completely immaterial to the goal.

Hardly a new political phenomena, and policies with known predictable outcomes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23X14HS4gLk

One must sympathize with the good folks at AMCHAM that will have to clean up the mess.

Have a wonderful day =)

Because we voted to destroy our own economy to own libs

why give money to "woke" schools like Harvard?.... /s

Terrorism? You mean being a demographic disproportionately critical of Israel?

This won't put an end to social media. It will only amplify posts/thoughts that are uncritical of the administration.

Hopefully. I feel like people actually stopped socialising after the social media breakthrough. It's harder to ask friends out for a coffee or beer because "nah, we can just talk online". We have locked ourselves in virtual communities where we have a false feeling of importance. Boards were the last acceptable form of socialising, but it was different, it was aimed at exchanging knowledge and common interest, not replacing real interactions completely.

Probably not. This mostly just tips the balance towards constraining what foreign students can say, and they are a tiny, tiny sliver of the criticism of the US online.

It's mostly about creating a climate of fear. This administration wants people who are vulnerable to shut up so they don't have to work so hard to shut people up. I don't doubt that they will move on to testing the waters on how to shut up citizens too; the paths for non-citizens are just more obvious (since the US government carved out clear delineations that indicate non-citizens don't enjoy Constitutional protections to allow them to be tortured after September 11).

I've been thinking the same thing with AI. If IG and Tiktok become so flooded with AI slop that people lose interest in "social" media altogether, I think that's a net positive for society and general mental health.

Argue? It's not at all ambiguous in the Bill of Rights that it does apply to non-citizens.

Personal opinion: if people who live in China (a country with a much longer and clearer history of overt censorship) still talk about Winnie-the-Pooh, I doubt this change will really have the impact the administration hopes for.

Sure, and shipping those same folks to Alligator Alcatraz will become the “new normal”. And eventually we’ll just start killing them for sport as the new normal. I don’t mean to be that guy, but Hitler also was just a “new normal” guy trying to remove some WWI debt and make Germany great again.

They would check. And if it turns out you have another email you didn't report, which is somehow linked to some other digital asset of yours, and therefore traceable, then you'd have a bigger problem.

The requirement forces you to keep the profile public when appearing for the interview at least.

Presumably if they find out that you have an account you didn't share, you're out.

They make applicants list the accounts and then check them.

MAGA hates higher education, so they will kneecap higher education. Israel is just a convenient excuse.

It's not for Israel, that's just a proxy - a shibboleth - if you are against Israel you are either a communist, libtard or muslim, so not welcome. It's Trump shooting some knees to stay in power.

Edit: I know. It's just a convenient foil!

> Nowadays there are "paid" protestors and social media personalities who seem to spread misinformation for money.

Most of whom are Chinese.[1] Somehow I don't think they plan to go after them.

[1] Very obvious during the Hong Kong protests.

This isn't about national security threats. It's about any excuse for racism and xenophobia.

Posting social media comments protesting the actions of Israel is not a national security threat but is something we've seen this administration invoke penalties for.

The hatred, bigotry, and raw short sightedness are horrifying. To the degree that America is "great" it is great because it was a place where great people from around the world wanted to come to and wanted to live in. Turning away students - the most likely source of new scientific and artistic greatness in the future - is throwing away any leadership we had and actively harming the country.

It is in fact harming national security if these brilliant minds study, live, and work in other countries.

"To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.”"

It leaves me with a lot of questions.

What even constitutes a social media profile? For how long do you have to mark it public? What if marking all your social media profiles public exposes you to harm? Is it acceptable to delete all your posts (that were previously _private_) before making a profile public, or to delete whole profiles, or would that desire for privacy be seen as concealing some threat? How is it known if there are non-public profiles? Would govt believe somebody who has no social media presence at all?

"screening visa applicants for threats" is a very simplistic summary of the situation. I think visa applicants are just gonna go eleswhere.

It isn't. The problem is that everyone thinks they'll be screened for political views, because of prior statements by the white house.

The famously dangerous threats that are thoroughly documented college level students. Americans have commited the majority of terrorist attacks in their own country, especially if you count school shootings

It's the equivalent of:

"To apply for a visa, applicants need to give us (and the rest of the world) access to all email correspondence."

No one is complaining about screening for threats. It's how that's a problem.

This is not about national security. We were already scanning social media profiles for that kind of stuff when folks applied for visas. This is arbitrary.

Would only international students pose the risk to national security? Do you then agree that government should keep every profile under surveillance so no private profile exists for anybody? Also, who posts threats on social media?

There's screening for terrorist ties and then there's screening for wrongthink, no?

It's just that "national security" apparently now is the same as "threatens the Presidents ego".

Welcome to America, where having a thought police is absolutely not against freedom of speech, while having the right to attend a literal Nazi march is a beautiful expression of Freedom of speech.

You know exactly how dumb this policy is, how threatening to freedom of speech it is, and why we are doing it only specifically for college students.

> If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

You're cherry picking and assuming they only look for obvious criminal offences like "government overthrow" and not dissenting views, criticism of the people in power, views against the economic order, etc. For some of those I can imagine the answer being "no" in Japan and "Yes" in the US.

Isn't Japan somewhat famously hard to immigrate too? This kinda smuggles in the premise that their state of affairs is desirable and normal.

  "Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings."[1]

  >> "Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings."[1]

There have been cases of speed-tickets turned into deportation notices for international students. Would Japan do that too for a speed limit violation?

Why would I desire a regression to the mean as a citizen? Freedom of expression is critical, and there is no guidance at ALL about what constitutes offending speech vs. what does not. Arbitrary denial of entry is not something that should be celebrated.

Wow this shows some really nice propagandist accumen, I wonder if it's literally a paid employee or something, judging by the comment history. You first rope in drunk drivers and illegal immigrants with the point being discussed (legal students) and then you exaggerate, saying people might be threatening domestic terrorism on social media. How cool!

You fail to address, though, that 1- the US is requiring social media accounts to be set to public, forcing people's hand into being labled as aggitators. 2- stuff that might be of academic interest is notoriously targeted by this admin, like any research being done on Israel/Palestine, any research being done on ESG, not to mention the more overt leftist themes (pro-LGBT, abortion, etc academics). This change is an easy way for the admin to target this type of research

None of these things apply to the average exchange student coming to the country legally to study at our universities.

Those are the wrong questions.

The US was built on immigration; Japan never was -- it has always been anti-immigration. There's no Statue of Liberty with "give me your huddled masses" inscription.

These harsh actions go against the principles on which the US was founded and built. Similar actions in Japan do not go against the principles on which Japan was founded.

A separate conversation, but immigration -- legal or illegal -- greatly benefits the US economically. While conversely, Japan's immigration policies are greatly hurting its economy as its population declines.

I'm not pro- illegal immigration. I'm for making legal immigration much more accessible so that you don't end up with millions of illegal immigrants.

I would bet you anything you want that posting that you don't like the Israeli government's genocide in Gaza (a major topic for this type of scrutiny) will get you neither deported nor even turned back at the border in Japan.

> If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

This administration already considers protesting genocide a “threat to national security”. It has a well documented history of retaliating against protected speech. This latest policy is authoritarian retaliation against of free speech, plain and simple. Comparing the policy of a liberal democracy like Japan to contemporary US authoritarianism is truly disingenuous.

Why? The United States is not Japan. The United States has built its national identity on exceptionalism; regression-to-the-mean reasoning is flawed in that context.

When the United States was founded, the average nation was some flavor of monarchy.