New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles

also, "lack of a social media profile could prompt US visa denial"

source https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/study/now-lack-of-a...

What? And which social medias am I required to have a profile on?

Absolutely insane. Until recently, I had none. Now I at least have a LinkedIn account. My mother has no social media at all.

What’s stopping someone from using LLMs to create a alt account? Imagine a bot that takes stuff from you actual a/c and posts the mirror opposite posts on the alt one.

> this is too insane to be reality

Is reality supposed to be less insane than this? Is this even insane in the first place?

Don't post pictures of yourself on the internet (and don't let your relatives do that), and you can say it wasn't you.

So you have no HN account? No YouTube Account? No Reddit Account?

These are all forms of Social Media.

Yes, and yes.

> What’s stopping someone from using LLMs to create an alt account?

For the applicant? Visa fraud rules. For people fucking with third parties? Absolutely nothing.

That is really sad, especially for people here, because the kind of people who dwell on HN are likely to specifically avoid creating much of a public profile on account of their increased knowledge and perception of these systems.

Time to go study in Europe, folks.

Speaking for myself I have an HN account but why would I want those other two? And I certainly don't have any "social" accounts under my legal name.

I'm not even comfortable with ICANN based DNS given that the identity requirements amount to an impressum. That's fine for business dealings but interpersonal communications (including the metadata) should be private from outside observers.

I create and delete HN accounts every... 80-200 karma. I don't have a youtube account. I don't have a reddit account.

Why is it so difficult to believe that there are people here who view social media as a harmful thing they try to mostly avoid?

Well, the guy was elected democratically, and democracy is supposed to work, right? Where did things go wrong? Why do people elect someone and then complain the person is bad? How do people choose who to vote for? What is even the point of complaining, what are you going to do? Elect someone else next time, so that the same thing happens? Revolt? Good luck with that.

What makes you think the world has ever been sane? Tell me what I'm missing, please.

I’ve been on HN since the beginning. I’m on my 12th or so username. Like you I don’t have a Reddit, Facebook, etc. account. Social Media is a plague on society.

I’m not sure the logic that “he was elected democratically, therefore everything he does is fine and is what people wanted” is sound. I’m not sure why you do.

Democracy was subverted with Citizen's United. Campaign finance regulation existed for a reason. We no longer have a sovereignty after it as foreign nations can purchase influence through PACs. In order to begin regaining democratic rule, we must regulate campaign finance again.

If the world is heading the way the US is heading, I may be inclined to start doing the same. This is the only "social media" account I have left, but if my freedom of expressing myself will be impaired by governmental stalking like this I will sadly have to "adapt". Losing my ability to help filter and manage by upvoting and flagging blows though.

New business idea- AI powered burner profiles. Company starts building generic profiles that follow acceptable account, occasionally likes some or posts some lame LLM generated posts. Some point in the future company sells you access to the account.

Truth Social

Most large social networks now require biometric authentication of identity to prevent alts.

Even Uber requires facial biometrics for an account now if you try to sign up using a prepaid card and VPN.

> I create and delete HN accounts every... 80-200 karma. Why is it so difficult to believe that there are people here who view social media as a harmful thing they try to mostly avoid?

I don't know that "resetting my account" is the solution to "harmful and I want to avoid". I get why you're doing it in your mind (and there's validity to some parts), but to me "I see social media as harmful" means "I don't go on social media", not "I keep going on it, just with different credentials every so often".

I'm only saying that, could it be that democracy doesn't actually work? It's not the first time Trump is the president, so he must have done really well for people to elect him again, right? He definitely was not impeached two times, right?

As a voter, who are you supposed to vote for?

And a self-hosted version where it can be fed some personalized info as basic prompt.

Not even a linkedin? Bluesky,A google maps thingy? Not even an FSF subscription and GNU social account?

You have the freedom to be off the grid, but the states have the freedom to reject your entry.

That's against ToS, you are on the wrong ethical side. This is the technology and behaviour patterns that fraudsters use, you would be indistinguishable from an enemy .

I think at this point the onus is on you to provide some form of alternative. Can you provide to the officers at port of entry some proof of employment, or whatever?

If you are just going to blindly be indistinguishable from bad actors and do no effort in distinguishing yourself., then yea, don't travel to that country.

It's become very hard to tell whether this is sarcasm. I sure hope it is, though.

I think nobody is screaming here that this particular action is illegal, as I read the comments. However, there is many things governments can do, that can be considered (under different subjective considerations) unethical, following a hidden agenda or plainly stupid. My personal decision at the moment is that I do not travel to the US. Which means that at times our papers are not presented at US conferences because my PhD students don't get visa (even unrelated to the current ban). I think the US will survive this particular loss though.

Strawman.

No one is saying states don’t have the right.

States can go even further. They can decide to exit economic unions, trade agreements, etc. You have sovereignty.

Everyone knows you have freedom to play cards as you see fit. Everyone who understands how the game is played, will also make moves accordingly.

There’s nothing to be defensive about.

What’s the violation again? Automating account activity? Liking stupid cat pictures? Following mid tier influencers? Having vanilla posts?

I’m not engaging in click fraud or attempting to monetize an account illegally. And it’s certainly doing what anyone could do on their own. Or is everyone 100% honest on social media all of the time?

In India people are going around asking to buy Telegram accounts. Not exactly a centralized operation.

the very legally binding novel-sized tos? the tos they change as often as they like to benefit only them? nobody is ethical here - they abuse us, we abuse them

I'm tired of hearing "you have the freedom to [x]", when it's always accompanied by "but if you do exercise that freedom, you will be treated as a second-class citizen".

But a national ID card is literally Satan?

> Well, the guy was elected democratically, and democracy is supposed to work, right?

No, democracy is not supposed to "work" 100% of the time without fail. It obviously depends on the context, and the details of how that particular democracy is implemented.

Become ungovernable...

This hn account is my only social media account.

I do not use apps, nor carry a cell phone.

If your parking requires an app, I am not paying.

Should the court require me to sign an affadavid stating I do not use email nor text messaging, so shall I attest.

Fun tip for ex-redditors: you can view multiple subreddits (without an account) adding `+` between communities within URLs, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews+worldnews+dataISbeautifu...

I think it's about tracking and profiling? Not wanting to be part of that is a valid choice and shouldn't be punished in any way. Forcing a certain behavior or else you're considered suspicious is pretty twisted and dystopian. Not my problem whoever is doing this can't find a better way of separating threats from certain privacy conscious mental profiles.

This looks taken out of context. First, Economic Times is a shitty news source. The original was reported by Bloomberg, a much better news source. (What is their SEO dept doing to get ahead of Bloomberg in Google search results?)

The exact quote: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/immigration/rubio-orders-tough...

    > Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday ordered more scrutiny of the social-media profiles of any foreigners seeking to visit Harvard University, telling US consular officers that applicants’ lack of an online presence might be enough evidence to deny a visa.

This part is important: "any foreigners seeking to visit Harvard University"

Is Rubio's cable sent to US embassies worldwide public? It would be nice to see the full text.

Social media is where one shares ones social life (it's in the name!). Technical discussion forums are something entirely different.

Naturally, there is sometimes crossover (I'm thinking of a motorbike forum I frequent), but to suggest the likes of HN is social media is demonstrably false.

The idea that countries have any right to restrict the movements of non-criminals is not settled.

If I own land, I should be able to invite anyone, anywhere to come stand on it. This idea that you have no right to freedom of movement and travel on Earth is a ridiculous one.

Passports as a concept are only about a hundred years old. Prior to that if you wanted to go somewhere, you just went.

> What is their SEO dept doing to get ahead of Bloomberg in Google search results?

I thought ET/Hindustan Times etc showed up in Google Search results since I search from the region. But if they show up before Bloomberg/FT/WSJ etc for other regions too, then ET's SEO team is doing something terrific.

There is now a notice on each and every US Embassy website visa home page that says:

Effective immediately, all individuals applying for an F, M, or J nonimmigrant visa are requested to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media accounts to ‘public’ to facilitate vetting necessary to establish their identity and admissibility to the United States under U.S. law.

Pick any at random to verify.

The base concept is significantly older. Even today, if you’re rich enough you can go anywhere; but serfs did not just leave.

Somehow, most people now treat “belonging to the land” as a positive concept.

Yeah.Those rules protect websites from spam for example, and in the case of more serious sites like linkedin, fraud.

If you go deep into this route you'll end up using proxies to rotate ips, which are sometimes obtained through compromised devices.

One thing is the theory, but look into how this is done, robotic interfaces like with selenium, shady proxies, account markets, you get a feel of exactly what type of people use this. If you into forums there's a lot of third worlders that go as far as using or selling fakepassports to make LI accounts.

> could it be that democracy doesn't actually work?

Clearly it doesn’t work all of the time, but… uh… what does?

>If I own land, I should be able to invite anyone, anywhere to come stand on it

Naturally there's conflicts between different rights, and yours end where other's begin.

In this case one should not be able to jeopardize the safety or well being of their neighbours by inviting

>Passports as a concept are only about a hundred years old. Prior to that if you wanted to go somewhere, you just went.

We did have castles for quite some centuries

You seem to think that paperwork with a country’s name on it can tell you whether or not inviting that person to your land jeopardizes the safety or well being of your neighbors.

You are mistaken.

This idea that you are somehow safer next to citizens of your own country and less safe next to citizens of a different country is simply incorrect is citizenship is the discriminator you are using.

Based on your comments in this thread, you seem to have a conclusion to which you are attached, and then work backwards from there. This comment of yours really lays that bare in its ridiculousness.

Democracy does "work" in the sense that there is some causal, albeit not direct, relationship between votes cast and representatives elected, vis-a-vis voting for said representatives. Trump supporters voted for him, and his agenda, and are getting what they voted for. And under the American electoral system neither majority support per capita nor even a popular vote beyond a margin of error are required for success, because states and state electoral votes (which are biased to favor rural, conservative politics) determine the outcome.

The problem here is not democracy per se so much as the inherent biases in the American system which allow a minority of voters to hijack the process so long as they live in the correct states, and American culture in which the apathy and disgust towards government and politicians is so toxic that people literally cannot see a difference between any one politician and any other.

As for who to vote for, I mean, I'm not a huge fan of Kamala Harris or the Democrats but I don't think she would be doing half of the heinous shit that Trump currently is, so I would posit the apparently controversial thesis that y'all should have not fucking voted for Donald Trump. This was one of the rare elections in which there was a right choice and a wrong choice. Or, if you can't accept that, a greater evil and lesser evil.

But Americans chose the greater evil. Barring some revelation of electoral fraud, Trump was America's choice, fairly and legitimately elected within the rules of the system. Democracy worked as intended. This is the government Americans wanted. Now Americans just have to deal with it.

The OP comment in this thread has an account over 13 years old. That was the point when they said they didn't have any social media accounts.

> and American culture in which the apathy and disgust towards government and politicians is so toxic that people literally cannot see a difference between any one politician and any other.

This was also pushed over decades by both a major political party and the most popular news network. It was deliberate cultural poisoning.

I am actually an FSF associate member. What is your point, to alienate other FSF supporters or something?

That sounds terrible. Do you think the US can recover from this if these policies extend for the full 4-year presidential period?

How would one prove fraud? I'm trying to understand the logic behind all of this.

Simple solution: create a fake public Facebook account. Post something about the weather.

No, I just meant that that would qualify as a social media account or as an alternative.

"You seem to think that paperwork with a country’s name on it"

Is that what you call your country's constitution?

It's the land of your country first, without a country and without a (1T/yr) army, you might have the right to land, but not its exercise. The right to your land is guaranteed by your constitution, and in the same breath it defines that they are sovereign to all of the land in the States. It's not your land first and then the state's sovereign, but the other way around.

Since we are on the subject of the constitution,

"“The Congress shall have Power... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” “To provide for the common Defence…”

So I wasn't too far off with the argument of your neighbours having a say on who you invite over to your land. It seems you are the one with the contrarian viewpoint.

It's unclear how it was supposed to work in the first place as there is no basis upon which I can decide who to vote for given a number of strangers I don't know anything about. I also know next to nothing about history, politics, economy, law, et cetera. Candidates usually promise things that are easy to understand of course, but as we've seen time and time again there is no consequences for not following through.

Oh I might have misspoken, what I meant by "the states" was "The United States" rather than "the individual states". I think capitalizing it as "The States" or even "the States" should be sufficient to distinguish it correctly in the future.

On another topic, I think neither individuals nor the states, have sovereignity over the land, only The State has. But I may be mistaken.

I’m not sure if you are intentionally moving the goalposts, but I was referring to a passport.

Citizenship or lack thereof doesn’t tell you whether or not it is a risk to have someone participate in your society. People who believe it can serve as a proxy for this decision are mistaken.

It's similar to the socialist: "we have freedom of speech, the only thing missing is freedom after you speak".

Hat tip: Great follow-up. I asked Google AI about those visa types and it told me:

    > F, M, and J visas are all nonimmigrant visas for foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs in the United States.

Tangent: US must have 5x the number of visa types compared to most other highly developed nations. Whenever there is a US visa discussion on HN, I always learn about a few more types! Plus they have all sorts of weird carve-outs for various nations: Looking at you Australia and Singapore.

It is ridiculous how good is Economic Times' SEO team! The crap they pump out reads like a ChatGPT summary from other major newspapers. Grumble...

Alcohol is harmful, but I have a glass of wine or whiskey from time to time. HN is my glass of whiskey.

I create an account, and delete it once I start feeling invested. If I can downvote people, I've probably ridden that account too long.

Once I start seeing the number next to my name and think "I should make that number bigger! This is fun!" then I've hit the point that I'm too invested. I'm letting the number make decisions, not me.

Then I delete it. I'll leave it deleted until I find a comment I simply cannot not respond to, and deal with being a green text person again for awhile. I'll get irritated at being blocked by default for most folks, and engage less.

It helps me self-moderate a slightly toxic experience so it's something I enjoy without it becoming a problem.