White House discussing asking foreign visitors for social media and phone contacts

Well, it happened under Obama's leadership https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/26/us-customs-soc.... Previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11984609.

Notably:

"If the foreign visitor declines to share such information, he or she could be denied entry."

That part is new, isn't it?

Nope but just check the difference in tone.

The current travel restrictions also happened under Obama, Trump used the same list of restricted countries that the Obama administration highlighted. The previous restrictions applied to anyone who traveled to those countries since 2011.

I wonder if there are actual stats on how many people were affected by the previous restriction vs the current one.

People yelling about war crimes and refugee crisis while the actual figures of refugees admitted to the US are ridiculously low without any restrictions.

And those who are admitted are the cream of the top, those who can pay as much as 50,000$ per head if not more to be smuggled to a country, have papers made for them, afford air fares to the US and the cost of the admission.

It's not that US ports were bombarded by barefoot orphans, the vast majority of refugees in the US were from the upper classes who could afford it, they came on a cousy flight from Zurich or Frankfurt and not on a boat from Cuba.

Yes it's all sad and unfair but the real tragedy and travesty is the the current narrative that is being blown out of all proportions which allows pasty guardian reporters to feel good about themselves because they uninstalled Uber while ignoring the real atrocities that happen around the world.

While the 10-15K Syrian's admitted in the US are not a tiny number on it's own but when viewed globally with the ~5M Syrian refugees and 14M Syrians in need of dire humanitarian aid in country it's irrelevant.

Is there an official blacklist of disapproved websites? If so, isn't that a form of censorship?

An official rule to deny entry might be new, not sure, but border control can already deny entry for that (as they can for basically any other reason).