US demands social media details from visa applicants

This was stupid when it was just potential employers expecting this information, and it’s even stupider here.

Let’s see how many bad reasons for this I can come up with in 30 seconds:

1. Social media may be popular but it is not universal (I still know people without a Facebook profile for instance). Thus, while the government should expect that someone may truthfully answer “I don’t have social media accounts”, I’ll bet money that anyone actually giving that answer on their visa application is screwed.

2. Huge numbers of social media profiles are completely FAKE. Combined with #1 above, if you don’t actually use a particular site but it seems like you do, you are again screwed.

3. Some people have extremely common names and legitimately do not want their pictures posted. Therefore, it is likely there are hundreds of real accounts with your name, many even in your city, that are not you. If the government is trying to determine if you “lied” about having an account, how many of these are they going to accuse you of owning? Or are they just going to conclude, based on the stuff being posted by those people, that your application should be denied?

4. The government does not run these sites, corporations do (and ultimately, random employees made some rules for running them). Suppose #2 above occurs, and someone is posting insane stuff as “you”; great, now your entire damned visa application is in danger, and some random set of rules made up by an employee at Facebook or Twitter is going to decide your fate. Can you get the profile taken down? Ask Facebook. Can you “prove” the profile is not you? Follow random rules from Facebook. And so on.

5. Not everything I do is on social media. And if I were to set up a secret club or criminal enterprise, do you think I’d be writing about it on Twitter and Facebook?!?!? What will exist on social media for a lot of people is an endless firehose of crap, which will mostly give the government way too much information to sift through. It will be a huge waste of time.

In other words, this policy can definitely hurt legitimate applicants and is not likely to add any useful information when screening applicants that “should” be denied.

Yes and no. I don't think it is black and white. While I'd say that there are isolationist aspects it isn't like how China has been (probably deserved considering the British). There's definitely a scale. We clearly aren't North Korea, which is what people think of when they think of an isolationist country. But I also can't think of a country that isn't at least a little isolationist.

So I wouldn't say that isolationism runs deep. It is definitely there, I would definitely say that it is a escarpment but that doesn't mean it is the Grand Canyon or the Marianas Trench.

That's some quality sarcasm. Thank you for that.

I am happy to never visit the US due to the rules.

However it sucks that the US is the easiest/cheapest way to transit to many countries.

However I can't transit through say LA without "entering" the US.

So I can't visit other countries easily (especially Canada, or central America).

Because americans are stupid and short sighted.

We've seen what happens when you double down on isolationism. Japan sells more adult diapers than baby ones.

But hey, when you spend 8 years screaming BROWN MAN BAD it's not surprising you make dumb decisions in other aspects of your life.