Who is affected by new US visa rule that demands all social media accounts be made public?

Yahoo

26-06-2025

People wishing to visit the USA may be forced to make their social media profiles public under new rules announced by the American Embassy in London.
On Thursday, the US embassy posted on X that anyone applying for an F, M or J nonimmigrant visa "are requested to adjust privacy settings on all of their personal social media accounts to 'public' to facilitate vetting necessary to establish their identity and admissibility."
They said the change was effective immediately.
Last week, the US resumed applications for students wishing to study in the US after Trump suspended them.
The resumption came with increased vetting, like examining social media profiles.
Effective immediately, all individuals applying for an F, M, or J nonimmigrant visa are requested to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media accounts to 'public' to facilitate vetting necessary to establish their identity and admissibility to the United States… pic.twitter.com/PFTg8Os2x6
— U.S. Embassy London Consular (@USAinUKConsular) June 23, 2025
All three of these types of visas apply to people who wish to study in the United States.
An F status visa is for a student who wishes to study a traditional academic course at a higher education institution, like an English degree.
An M status visa is for students who are enrolling in a vocational course that may be sponsored by a business or another institution. These are for people who wish to gain technical skills like aviation or electrical engineering.
A J status visa is for someone who is participating in a cultural exchange programme, usually organised by their home country's government in partnership with Washington.
These visas are much broader and can involve work roles rather than education, but they must still be sponsored by a government.
The move is part of a wider clampdown on immigration initiated by the Trump administration.
The US has also been revoking visas of people who have entered the country due to their political activity, with social media tracking part of the way they determine who is in and who is out.
Several cases have attracted media attention, with Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was in the US as part of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship, being detained by plain-clothed immigration officers in broad daylight.
She was arrested and had her visa revoked after she expressed pro-Palestine views in her student newspaper. The Department of Homeland Security claimed she had actively supported Hamas.
The British band UK Subs claimed in March that they had been denied entry to the US because of critical comments some of their members had made about Trump.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio has been boasting about how many students have had their visas revoked after saying in March he had cancelled 300 visas connected to "lunatics" who attended pro-Palestine protests in the US. It is believed more than 1,000 visas have been revoked since then.
The new rules apply to students and people wishing to enter the US on cultural exchange programmes.
In April the US immigration service implemented similar rules for people looking to live permanently in the country.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services said they "will begin considering aliens' antisemitic activity on social media and the physical harassment of Jewish individuals as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests."
They said under the guidance issued to them by the government, they "will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity" as a reason for refusing immigration requests.
Scholars in the US have reacted with fury to the tight new rules.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the new policy evokes the ideological vetting of the Cold War, when prominent artists and intellectuals were excluded from the US.
'This policy makes a censor of every consular officer, and it will inevitably chill legitimate political speech both inside and outside the United States," Jaffer said.
The social media rules are also not the only way the Trump administration has been intervening in US academic institutions.
Trump has had a much-publicised spat with Harvard and threatened to cancel large amounts of its funding unless it reined in what he labelled as acceptance of antisemitism at the institution. Harvard has pushed back against the accusations.
Earlier in June, nearly all of the members of the board overseeing the prestigious Fulbright scholarship resigned over what they called Trump's meddling with the programme.
They said the US government had denied awards to several students who had already been accepted into the programme.
The highly selective awards promote US citizens studying abroad in exchange for foreigners studying in the US. Several prominent British politicians have been beneficiaries of the programme, including former prime minister Rishi Sunak.