On September 18, 2017, in accordance with the Privacy Act of 1974, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a new rule in the Federal Register last week, that establishes that certain electronic documents be part of all immigrants’ (including permanent residents and naturalized citizens!) official records which will include “social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results. This would also affect all US citizens who communicate with immigrants.

A move that has alarmed lawyers and privacy groups worried about how the information will be used.

Incorporating social media information into immigration records has become a point of focus in recent years and there is a growing trend at the Department of Homeland Security to be looking at the social media of immigrants and foreigners. As early as 2015, DHS began working on a plan to add social media searches into visa application protocol and in 2016, DHS proposed and implemented a new section in the travel form for foreign visitors coming to the US under the visa waiver program that asks for social media handles and just in June 2017, the Trump administration introduced an expanded visa applicant questionnaire that asks for all social media handles used in the last five years.

It is questionable how effective this program really is as it is simply very difficult to successfully use social media to determine what people are going or not going to do. When looking at all the ways in which we use communication tools, social media is different, very truncated. People use emojis, and short form and sometimes it is difficult to know what something means. As such, the Office of the Inspector General published a report that found the DHS pilot programs for using social media to screen immigration applicants lacked criteria to determine their effectiveness.

However, as social media may not be able to predict violence, it can certainly tell you a lot about the political, personal and religious views of people abroad and in the US and having government oversight with the potential for life-changing adverse consequences when it comes to social media use by prospective immigrants is a direct hit to the longstanding promotion of free speech that for long was at the core of the US constitution.