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New State Department guidance released this month instructs student visa applicants to “adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public,’” a task which will be difficult to accomplish as several social media services listed in the online visa application form haven’t been operational in years.
The student visa form requires applicants to provide the usernames for “each social media platform you have used within the last five years” from a list of 20 specified services, some of them obsolete. This means applicants could find themselves in the awkward position of being required to make public their profiles on the short-form video service Vine, which closed in 2017; the short-lived social media platform Google+, which shut down in 2019; or the dating site Twoo, which ceased operations in 2021.
Most U.S. visa applicants have been required to disclose their profile names on social media accounts since 2019. The Trump administration rolled out new requirements for those seeking student visas under an “expanded screening and vetting” process. The expanded scrutiny applies to F (academic students), M (vocational students), and J (exchange visitor) visa applicants.
According to a State Department cable, obtained by the Free Press and Politico, the provided social media accounts will subsequently be checked for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.”
The DS-160: Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application form doesn’t appear to have been updated to reflect State’s recent guidance, as it doesn’t presently make any mention of the accounts needing to be made public.
“Government social media surveillance invades privacy and chills freedom of speech, and it is prone to errors and misinterpretation without ever having been proven effective at assessing security threats,” warned Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She said that by requiring social media accounts be made public, “the U.S. government is endorsing the violation of a fundamental principle of privacy hygiene.”
The online visa application lists a dropdown menu with 20 social media accounts to choose from.
- Ask.fm
- Douban
- Flickr
- Google+
- Myspace
- Qzone (QQ)
- Sina Weibo
- Tencent Weibo
- Tumblr
- Twoo
- Vine
- VKontakte (VK)
- Youku
- YouTube
The list is mishmash of popular social media providers, regional services (predominantly those used in China), and a bevy of outdated and defunct platforms, such as Myspace, which has been a digital ghost town for years.
A quarter of the sites listed no longer exist at all, with some already being defunct when the visa application form first started requiring the disclosure of social media usernames in 2019. That includes Ask.fm, a Latvian service where users could ask questions that closed last year, and Tencent Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service that shut down in 2020.
“Those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”
Among the included services are Douban, Qzone, Sina Weibo, and Youku — all active Chinese social network sites. Despite listing five different Chinese social media sites, the form leaves off Tencent’s WeChat, China’s most popular social media app.
VKontakte is the only Russian social media service appearing on the list. No other popular regional social media sites are included.
Other modern social media platforms, such as TikTok or Trump’s own Truth Social, are missing from the list as well, though the visa form does allow applicants to specify additional accounts.
Asked for comment on how this list of social media platforms was compiled, or whether there are plans to update the online form, a State Department spokesperson provided a statement summarizing the new guidance and said that “the Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.”
Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, described the policy as “antithetical to everything our First Amendment should protect,” pointing out that “not only will these shortsighted efforts fail to protect the public, they’ll put countless students at risk. Now those who wanted to study in the U.S. to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media public to those same governments to study here.”
