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

Outside of just wanting privacy for its own sake, there are many, many reasons to keep social media profiles private: health privacy, sexual orientation privacy, relationship privacy, location privacy, financial privacy, etc.

“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said.

Another of the thousand reasons people should delete their Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Wouldn’t that be likely to be taken as identical to having a locked one? I don’t use traditional social media, and never have, and have always assumed that would cause me to “fail” a test like this.

(Sorry, I mean this to read as a question, not an assertion.)

if having an instagram/tiktok/facebook/etc is a hard requirement for entering the country, we've truly reached peak clown world

If 99% have the account then rejecting the 1% seems like a good way to not let different weirdos (like me) enter the country?

And the irony is that this would reject only those who properly did the paperwork and won't stop the people who prefer different methods of entry.

Nobody is illegally entering the country and then beginning graduate studies at Harvard, so if you understand this as an attack on universities and an attempt to essentially “close” the country then it makes perfect sense. That JD Vance interview where he went on about “we didn’t need immigrants to get to the moon” is probably the clearest statement of their outlook.