State Department Wants to Know Student Visa Applicants’ Myspace Accounts

New State Department guidance disclosed this month instructs trainee visa applicants to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to community a task which will be complicated to accomplish as several social media services listed in the online visa application form haven t been operational in years The trainee visa form requires applicants to provide the usernames for each social media platform you have used within the last five years from a list of specified services various of them obsolete This means applicants could find themselves in the awkward position of being required to make community their profiles on the short-form video system Vine which closed in the short-lived social media platform Google which shut down in or the dating site Twoo which ceased operations in Majority of U S visa applicants have been required to disclose their profile names on social media accounts since The Trump administration rolled out new requirements for those seeking aspirant visas under an expanded screening and vetting process The expanded scrutiny applies to F academic students M vocational students and J exchange visitor visa applicants Related Moving across the U S Edge Here s How to Protect Yourself According to a State Department cable obtained by the Free Press and Politico the provided social media accounts will subsequently be checked for any indications of hostility towards the citizens custom authorities institutions or founding principles of the United States The DS- Online Nonimmigrant Visa Application form doesn t appear to have been updated to reflect State s current guidance as it doesn t presently make any mention of the accounts needing to be made population The social media section of the DS- visa application form U S State Department Ruling body social media surveillance invades privacy and chills freedom of speech and it is prone to errors and misinterpretation without ever having been proven effective at assessing precaution threats warned Sophia Cope a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation She disclosed that by requiring social media accounts be made inhabitants the U S cabinet is endorsing the violation of a fundamental principle of privacy hygiene The online visa application lists a dropdown menu with social media accounts to choose from Ask fm Douban Facebook Flickr Google Instagram LinkedIn Myspace Pinterest Qzone QQ Reddit Sina Weibo Tencent Weibo Tumblr Twitter Twoo Vine VKontakte VK Youku YouTube The list is mishmash of popular social media providers regional services predominantly those used in China and a bevy of outdated and defunct platforms such as Myspace which has been a digital ghost town for years A quarter of the sites listed no longer exist at all with a few already being defunct when the visa application form first started requiring the disclosure of social media usernames in That includes Ask fm a Latvian operation where users could ask questions that closed last year and Tencent Weibo a Chinese microblogging amenity that shut down in Those who yearned to analysis in the U S to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media community to those same governments to survey here Among the included services are Douban Qzone Sina Weibo and Youku all developing Chinese social setup sites Despite listing five different Chinese social media sites the form leaves off Tencent s WeChat China s majority of popular social media app VKontakte is the only Russian social media provision appearing on the list No other popular regional social media sites are included Other modern social media platforms such as TikTok or Trump s own Truth Social are missing from the list as well though the visa form does allow applicants to specify additional accounts Solicited for comment on how this list of social media platforms was compiled or whether there are plans to update the online form a State Department spokesperson provided a message summarizing the new guidance and stated that the Trump Administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national prevention and populace safety through our visa process Albert Fox Cahn founder and executive director of the Surveillance System Oversight Project described the agenda as antithetical to everything our First Amendment should protect pointing out that not only will these shortsighted efforts fail to protect the constituents they ll put countless students at exposure Now those who requested to evaluation in the U S to flee authoritarian governments abroad will have to make their social media population to those same governments to review here The post State Department Wants to Know Learner Visa Applicants Myspace Accounts appeared first on The Intercept