A student with an F-1 visa interview on July 2 is in panic mode because of his X (formerly Twitter) account.
While his account is private now, it used to be full of political content. It’s linked to the same email used for his F-1 visa application, and to top it all off, he follows people tied to the Palestine campus protests.
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He never listed the account on his visa form but with the authorities now screening public social media, he’s scared it’ll be flagged anyway. As the guidelines become more strict for F-1 aspirants, some are wondering if they should just delete their whole accounts.
The unfortunate part is that no one has the answers.
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Students are deleting tweets, locking accounts, and still feeling unsafe. No one knows what’s enough as people emphasize how difficult it is to really delete something from the internet.
It’s more than likely that your government can still access your deleted posts and accounts from the servers if they want to. Moreover, “suspicious” online activity like deleting posts might raise more red flags.
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As these rulings have just started rolling, with no interview experiences on record, everyone is just guessing what would be the best practice moving forward.
