Do You Want a Student Visa? Change Your Media Profile to ‘Public’

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New State Department guidance released this month instructs student visa applicants to “adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public,’” a task which will be difficult to accomplish as several social media services listed in the online visa application form haven’t been operational in years.

The student 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 20 specified services, some of them obsolete. This means applicants could find themselves in the awkward position of being required to make public their profiles on the short-form video service Vine, which closed in 2017; the short-lived social media platform Google+, which shut down in 2019; or the dating site Twoo, which ceased operations in 2021.

Most U.S. visa applicants have been required to disclose their profile names on social media accounts since 2019. The Trump administration rolled out new requirements for those seeking student 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.

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, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States.”