Trump Wants Even Foreign Tourists to Submit their Social Media Posts for Scrutiny, a Naked Bid to Deny Entry to Critics

The Trump administration has already been screening the social media posts of those who apply for student visas to ensure their ideological conformity. Now it is planning to do that for all foreign tourists.

The New York Times reports:

Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. …

This move from C.B.P. follows similar actions by the U.S. government to conduct social media reviews for some visa applicants, including seekers of the H-1B visas awarded to skilled foreign workers, as well as applicants for student and scholar visas. …

Bo Cooper, a partner at Fragomen, called the government’s new approach to social media screening a “paradigm shift” from when agencies used social media to verify specific facts, such as criminal activity.

“The new method involves looking at online speech, and then denying travel based on discretion and policy about the kinds of things that get said.” …

Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said in a statement that the mandatory social media disclosure and surveillance would “exacerbate civil liberties harms.”

“It has not proven effective at finding terrorists and other bad guys,” she added. “But it has chilled the free speech and invaded the privacy of innocent travelers, along with that of their American family, friends and colleagues.”

This follows the Trump administration moving to revoke the green cards of prominent critics of Elon Musk’s X. Yet while the Trump administration imposes its own ideological tests on travelers and immigrants, it also making plans to block the H-1B visas for skilled workers who have ever “worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance, and online safety.”

This is billed as fighting back against European “censorship,” but it actually consists of taking sides in debates over what kind of moderation online platforms should offer—and taking sides in favor of the purveyors of misinformation.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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