The State Department issued new guidelines Wednesday for more extensive social media vetting of all applicants for international student visas and exchange visitor visas, instructing consular officers to look for signs of “hostility” toward the United States.
Applicants will be asked to set all of their social media accounts to “public,” and will be notified that any failure to do so could be seen as evasive.
U.S. officials reviewing applications have been told to look for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.”
A senior State Department official said that the new vetting guidelines are part of an effort to “ensure we are properly screening every single person attempting to visit our country” and to make the U.S. and its universities safer.
The official said that consular posts could resume scheduling application interviews, which had been temporarily suspended as the State Department prepared stricter social media vetting.
Late last month, the State Department said in a cable that it was planning to expand social media screening and vetting for international student visa applications. This followed an announcement in April that Citizenship and Immigration Services would be taking into account “antisemitic activity on social media” as “grounds for denying immigration benefit requests.”
As a result, counselors who work with foreign students eager to attend college in the U.S. had already begun advising them to purge their social media accounts of posts that could attract the attention of State Department officials.
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