For months now, foreigners and even dual citizens have been worried about how their social media histories might affect their ability to travel freely to and from the U.S. It’s increasingly clear that the answer is a lot.
On Tuesday at the Federal Register, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol posted a proposed policy tweak: It now plans to dig around in tourists’ social media histories before letting them enter, even if they’re coming from some of the least scrutinized countries in the world.
According to its statement CBP “invites the public to comment” on a series of newly proposed
changes. Here’s number 3:
“3. Mandatory Social Media:
In order to comply with the January 2025 Executive Order 14161 (Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats), CBP is adding social media as a mandatory data element for an ESTA application. The data element will require ESTA applicants to provide their social media from the last 5 years.”
Note that this is for “ESTA” applicants meaning the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. This isn’t some additional crackdown on people, say, affiliated with countries covered by Trump’s travel ban—places like Afghanistan, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. This is aimed at travelers from visa waiver countries, places whose citizens are theoretically welcomed with open arms. Once they obtain a $40 authorization through ESTA—which, funnily enough, has an app—people from visa waiver countries like Australia, Japan, France, Iceland, the United Kingdom and South Korea are normally able to travel around the U.S. freely for 90 days.
C.B.P. also plans to require other personal information, such as email addresses from the last ten years, and the addresses, birth dates, and other identifying details of all family members of ESTA applicants.
This isn’t the first such social media crackdown. Earlier this month, the State Department announced a an expansion of the screening process for people applying for H-1B and Dependent H-4 visas—people who plan to move to the U.S. for work reasons. If you’re in this group, you’re told to “adjust the privacy settings on all of [your] social media profiles to ‘public,’” as part of the application process, and there’s no mention of only checking what you’ve posted in the past five years.
Speaking to the New York Times, Bo Cooper, a representative of the immigration firm Fragomen said of the checks on tourists’ social media posts that since the process “involves looking at online speech, and then denying travel based on discretion and policy” about what people have expressed, “It’ll be interesting to watch the tourism numbers.”
A June study from the World Travel and Tourism Council (as cited by Forbes) found that among the 184 countries it analyzed, the U.S. was the only one expected to see declining tourism numbers in 2025.
