Want to visit the U.S.? Be prepared to cough up your social media history.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection filed a legal proposal today that will make it mandatory for many tourists to submit the last five years of their social media history as part of the application required to visit the country. The public has 60 days, until early February, to submit comments to this proposal.
The social media requirement, if enacted, would apply to any visitor from the 42 different countries in the Visa Waiver Program. Rather than applying for a visa, these tourists must submit an application to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) and pay a $40 fee for visits of 90 days or less. That list includes many countries with close ties to the U.S. and whose citizens regularly visit, such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia.
If enacted, this requirement could strike yet another blow to international tourism. Through October, more than 9.3 million tourists have visited the U.S. from five countries that would be affected by this proposal—the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France, and South Korea—and the number of overseas visitors more broadly has fallen 2.5% compared with the same period in 2024, according to figures from the International Trade Administration.
NEW ‘HIGH VALUE DATA FIELDS’
The social media requirement isn’t the only proposed change for tourists visiting the U.S. The Trump administration also wants to add several other “high value data fields” to the ESTA application. These include telephone numbers used in the last five years, email addresses used in the last 10 years, and biometrics information that include fingerprints, DNA, and a photo of the iris.
Customs and Border Protection didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Fast Company. There was no information in the legal filing about how the U.S. plans to enforce this proposed change, particularly given how many tourists visit from the affected countries.
The changes to the requirements for non-visa tourists are being proposed to “comply” with one of the executive orders President Donald Trump signed in January, related to protecting the country from foreign terrorists. The latest proposal is similar to a new policy that the State Department announced in June requiring that applicants for certain U.S. visas would be instructed to set their social media profiles to the “public” setting to facilitate the vetting process.
A ‘PARADIGM SHIFT’
Such moves are relatively unprecedented. Americans visiting the European Union currently don’t have to submit any sort of application if their stay is less than 90 days. That will change once the EU implements a travel authorization requirement, but a social media history isn’t part of that vetting process.
And the administration’s latest proposal could prove to have a chilling effect on tourism, opponents argue. In 2024, tourism spending produced $2.9 trillion in economic output, according to figures from the U.S. Travel Association.
This proposal marks a “paradigm shift” of how the government is approaching social media by scrutinizing online speech and using that information to potentially deny travel based on discretion and policy about what the person said, Bo Cooper, a partner at Fragomen, told The New York Times. “It’ll be interesting to watch the tourism numbers.”
What’s more, the proposal sends a worrying message to potential tourists, who “should not have to fear that self-censorship is a condition of entry,” Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar for global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Axios.
“This is not the behavior of a country confident in its freedoms,” she said.