US State Department To Ask Visa Applicants To Provide Their Social Media Identifiers: The Hill

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The US State Department is to start asking “most applicants” for US visas to provide information on their social media accounts, the Hill cited an anonymous source.

Most visa applicants, including temporary visitors, will be required to list their social media identifiers in a drop-down menu along with other personal information.

Of course, applicants could say that they use no social media, but if they were caught in a lie they could face “serious immigration consequences,” if the lie to be revealed.

Currently only major social media are included, but in the future it is expected to be more widely encompassing.

“This is a critical step forward in establishing enhanced vetting of foreign nationals seeking entry into the United States,” the anonymous official told the Hill. “As we’ve seen around the world in recent years, social media can be a major forum for terrorist sentiment and activity. This will be a vital tool to screen out terrorists, public safety threats, and other dangerous individuals from gaining immigration benefits and setting foot on U.S. soil.”

The initial proposal to do the extra vetting was made by the US State Department on March 30^th, 2018.

“One question lists multiple social media platforms and requires the applicant to provide any identifiers used by applicants for those platforms during the five years preceding the date of application.

…

Other questions seek five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses, and international travel; all prior immigration violations; and whether specified family members have been involved in terrorist activities.”

Back then, Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project had the following to say:

“This attempt to collect a massive amount of information on the social media activity of millions of visa applicants is yet another ineffective and deeply problematic Trump administration plan. It will infringe on the rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens by chilling freedom of speech and association, particularly because people will now have to wonder if what they say online will be misconstrued or misunderstood by a government official. We’re also concerned about how the Trump administration defines the vague and overbroad term ‘terrorist activities’ because it is inherently political and can be used to discriminate against immigrants who have done nothing wrong. There is a real risk that social media vetting will unfairly target immigrants and travelers from Muslim-majority countries for discriminatory visa denials, without doing anything to protect national security.”

The policy itself is a result from a March 2017 executive order issued by President Trump intended to put “extreme vetting” into place.

Allegedly the measure is taken to see if individuals were supporting terrorist formations or expressing any alignment or there were attempts to at recruitment.

Since, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that simply sharing some piece of “fake news” according to the Washington-led narrative makes it impossible for an individual to even visit the US temporarily.

Naturally, how would individuals even dare share an opinion that defends, or God forbid, even praises Iran, North Korea, Russia or China. That would instantly mean that the person is either a radical, or a Kremlin-funded troll, who is trying to establish a troll farm on US soil.

Hopefully, if the new vetting measure is introduced, social media platforms also introduce a little button that allows a user to contact the CIA or another US security service and directly ask them if their opinion or the article and/or publication they’re about to share doesn’t make them ineligible from entering the US in the future.

Those that have expressed views or shared information that is deemed “fake” or “harmful” in the last 5 years are fresh out of luck, however.

And if one tries to delete older posts, they may also be out of luck, since the US Navy wants to collect 350 billion social media posts for its archive, more than likely the erasure of posts is simply a user-side action, but the server-side information remains.

MORE ON THE TOPIC:

• US Navy Wants An Archive Of 350 Billion Social Media Posts In All Languages “For Research”

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