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.

Question: Does this create more problems?

i.e. "I don't have a social media"; "Sureeeee buddy"; "I really don't, I deleted it"; "We'll wait here until you do"

Some scary variation above.

I have vague but genuine concerns about that. I legitimately don't have any social media accounts. Does HN count? Well, none that can be casually associated to the name on my passport.

> Does HN count?

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.

"Github" is on the drop-down list of social media identifiers for a US ESTA (visa waiver) application.

Saying that Github is social media (!) does not make it true!