Student Visa Applications Face Social Media Scrutiny

June 23rd, 2025

Christina Yang

In the midst of all the uncertainty following the pause on international visa appointments, the United States has now reopened the application process with stricter guidelines that even involve the government scrolling through your Instagram. On Wednesday, June 18, 2025, the U.S. Department of State issued a new set of guidelines that will require international students to make all of their social media accounts public in order for officials to conduct comprehensive reviews of their online activity.

Specifically, the Department of State outlines that consular officers must screen for support for foreign or terrorist organizations; hostility towards the United States, the government, or the nation’s founding principles; advocacy for violence or antisemitism; and any content that is deemed a threat to national security. Officials are also directed to flag any applicants who demonstrate a history of political activism on their accounts. Additionally, those who fail to change their social media accounts to the public setting will be suspected of hiding or deleting content and will be flagged by the officials as “suspicious,” making it significantly harder for them to receive a visa.

The new social media background checks apply to all visas under the F, J, and M categories, which refer to academic and vocational education as well as cultural exchange visas. However, these rules particularly affect students applying to elite institutions in the U.S., because international student populations are significantly higher there. Furthermore, these guidelines will be enforced to an even stricter degree when it comes to international students or exchange visitors from a country that the U.S. considers high risk or sensitive. For example, consular officials are being told to take extra caution when reviewing the applications of Chinese students due to the U.S. and China’s tense trade relations and disputes.

It is clear that these new guidelines will critically reshape the trajectory of how international students apply to educational institutions. College counselors have already begun to tell their students to change the privacy settings of their social media accounts and to prepare for in-depth questions regarding their past posts and affiliations with any organizations. The new application process is already expected to come with delays as it will now take significantly longer to review the applicants, especially considering that on average 446,000 student visas were issued in 2023 alone. To that end, the State Department has also prioritized visa appointments for institutions with a less than 15% international student enrollment rate, which will leave numerous other students scrambling for a timely appointment.

While the State Department has emphasized that this move is necessary to strengthen national security, human rights and education groups argue that this new change could censor free speech principles, deter international talent, risk student privacy, and echo Cold-War era ideological screening.

Thus, while the future for international students still remains uncertain, it is certain that this move is part of a broader goal by the Trump administration to crackdown on America’s most elite institutions and enforce stricter immigration policies.