The US government will use AI to underpin a “catch and revoke” programme to cancel the visas of foreign students whose social media accounts suggest support for Hamas or other designated terror groups.
Axios reported on the plan, citing senior state department officials, saying “The reviews of social media accounts are particularly looking for evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.”
The state department will also trawl databases to identify visa holders who were arrested during the Biden presidency nut not deported and will check news reports of anti-Israel demonstrations.
And it will dive into the Student Exchange Visitor System to check whether students who had been arrested of suspended had had their visas revoked.
It appears it's not just students who will be caught up in this social media swoop. Axios said the officials said ignoring publicly available information – ie, social media posts – would be negligent and “AI is one of the resources available to the government that's very different from where we were technologically decades ago.”
The move has prompted protests from pro Palestine and free speech groups in the US. Earlier this week, the ACLU published an open letter calling for the protection of free speech on campus.
It hasn’t prompted anything from X owner and self-proclaimed free speech absolutist Elon Musk.
The policy could cause problems for social media platforms, quite apart from the free speech implications. Social media tends to thrive on engagement, and this is more often sparked by conflict and contentious posts. That doesn't exactly square with a more guarded approach to posts.
See also: UK eyes "all-digital" borders by 2024, "rich" integrated new immigration database
It’s certainly not the first time US immigration authorities have paid close attention to social media. Trump’s first term saw the US bring in a policy requiring visa applicants to declare their social media accounts over a five year period.
That policy appears to have been extended this week.
But border control staffers were drawing on social media even before that. In 2012, two Brit tourists who’d previously tweeted about their plans to “destroy America” and dig up Marilyn Monroe ahead of a holiday in LA were met by unimpressed border officials. They refused to accept the holiday makers had simply been referring to plans to “party hard” and swiftly put them on a return flight.
