International students are scrubbing their social media or in some case reevaluating their decision to study in the U.S. after the Trump administration announced new visa screenings without offering specific insight into what could get someone on the no-entry list.
Companies that specialize in mass deletions of posts have seen an uptick in services since the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement. But clearing out everything the administration finds controversial could raise other alarms, leaving foreign students in a bind.
“I think students have pretty much assumed that anything is open for interpretation or misinterpretation, and so as a result, they’re extremely cautious when it comes to engaging with social media moving forward,” said Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of the Association of International Educators, or NAFSA.
The new screenings were announced in June after a three-week pause on visa interviews to update the policy, part of a broader Trump crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration.
The State Department said it would target those “who pose a threat to U.S. national security,” without specifying what that would entail, and demanded anyone applying for a student visa make their social media accounts public.
The go-to response from students appears to be cleansing their social media of anything even remotely controversial.
Dan Saltman, CEO and founder of Redact.dv, says his company’s trajectory has “greatly accelerated” with 10 percent growth each month for the past few months. His firm offers a software that allows individuals to mass delete posts across 30 different platforms.
“Basically, our understanding is that people are using this to clean up any political takes that they have, whatsoever, anything that can be seen as inflammatory, really kind of quelling freedom of speech,” Saltman said.
“We’ve especially seen this growth in international countries, especially India, China, South Korea, have been some of the biggest growth areas that we’ve seen on that front. And we’ve also seen it as well from people in the U.S. and the U.K., very heavily. So, it’s been an unprecedented level of change of how people think about their privacy,” he added.
China and India are the two biggest exporters of students to the U.S. In the 2023-2024 school year, around 1.1 million international students came to America, with those two nations making up more than half.
Shaun Carver, executive director of International House at the University of California, Berkeley, said his group has seen a 40 percent decrease in Chinese and Indian students since last year.
“India and China have always been 9 to 10 percent of the I-House population, and this year there both of them are below 6,” Carver said, adding other countries in Africa and the Middle East appear to be securitized heavily.
Students and advocates have been spooked for months as they watch the Trump administration target the visas of, and, at times, arrest international students who have expressed pro-Palestinian views.
The administration says those under scrutiny have expressed support for Hamas or antisemitism, but students fear getting caught up in a wide net that could potentially flag anything anti-Israel — or anti-Trump — as disqualifying.
In response to requests for clarification from The Hill, a State Department spokesperson reiterated students need to change their account settings to “public” for vetting purposes.
“As with any country, applying for a visa is voluntary, and individuals are free to decide whether to pursue travel to the United States,” the spokesperson added.
Plans to purge social media accounts could raise alarms, but the problem could be even worse for someone who never had social media before.
“It’s a catch-22 for students: If you didn’t have any social media presence to begin with, that could be considered suspect. And so what do you do about that?” Aw asked.
“You go ahead and you create a social media presence, and then, because you’ve created a social media presence” that would have little activity “could that also be considered suspect? So there’s, there’s no winning here on any level,” she added.
