U.S. to Begin Collecting Social Media Info on All Immigrants Oct. 18

As of October 18, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will expand the background checks it conducts on immigrants to cover social media and internet search results, a policy that will impact both green card holders and naturalized citizens.

The new Trump administration rule, which was published in the Federal Register and first reported by Buzzfeed News, notes that official immigration records will soon include “social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results”. The policy covers, among other things, data obtained from immigrants’ Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts, as well as “publicly available information obtained from the internet”.

The expansion of federal data collection efforts aimed at immigrants has alarmed privacy advocates, who worry at the privacy and free speech implications of government surveillance aimed at a particular group of people.

“This Privacy Act notice makes clear that the government intends to retain the social media information of people who have immigrated to this country, singling out a huge group of people to maintain files on what they say,” said Faiz Shakir, national policy director of the ACLU, according to CNET. “This would undoubtedly have a chilling effect on the free speech that’s expressed every day on social media.”

Others questioned the efficacy of turning to social media to screen for potentially dangerous immigrants. “It’s very difficult to successfully use social media to determine what people are going or not going to do,” Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, told BuzzFeed News. “When you look at all the different ways in which we use communication tools, and social media is pretty different, very truncated. People use emojis, they use short form, sometimes it’s difficult to know what something means.”

The new regulation is part and parcel of a trend of increasing social media screening that began during the Obama administration. In 2015, the DHS added social media checks to the screening process for visa applications. In February, Homeland Security announced it was planning to collect the social media handles and passwords of visitors from Trump’s list of banned Muslim-majority nations.