A State Department cable has expanded the headline that should be from The Onion: social media vetting now covers roughly twenty visa categories, cementing a project that began in June 2025. It actually, unapologetically, converts privacy itself into mens rea evidence. While the cable is where privacy just got weaponized, the public release has been providing sanitized cover.

Under new guidance, we will conduct a comprehensive and thorough vetting, including online presence, of all student and exchange visitor applicants in the F, M, and J nonimmigrant classifications.

To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.”

Privacy, when you read the cable, is being framed as a threat to national security. Not the withholding of details from the agent or the government. No. Any privacy at all in social media is the threat. Threat to America. Settings have to be changed generically to “public” in order to apply for a visa. That is actually two moves being mixed together.

First, the open disclosure becomes a default state for applicants, while any privacy requires justification. Is that the kind of person you want to apply for a visa, really? The quiet applicant without time spent on posts carries the same suspicion as one scrubbing accounts to hide. Both look identically suspicious to the officer.

Second, the cable has a construction of privacy being intent, because “effort to evade”. Evade what? The surveillance regime that generated the suspicious framing in the first place? Adequate or suspicious become the only available binary readings. A neutral position is eliminated to force a “openly for or openly against, pick one” under Trump.

Cold War loyalty boards used the same structure. Refusal to enumerate associations counted as evidence of disloyal associations.

Under Truman’s EO 9835 (1947) Loyalty Review Boards and Eisenhower’s EO 10450 (1953), invoking the Fifth or declining to enumerate associations was treated as substantive evidence of disloyalty. HUAC operated on the same principle. The Hollywood blacklist ran on procedural silence as proof of guilt. Refusal to cooperate counted as evidence of disloyal associations across the loyalty board and congressional venues, through different procedural routes

The disclosure ritual of the State is a Trump loyalty test only, because it’s entirely decoupled from any content the disclosure actually contains.

An after-effect is the performance pressure for this loyalty test. Applicants have to curate whatever they will disclose. The policy manufactures a global population of foreign nationals constructing sanitized public personas calibrated to anticipated consular tastes. That curation is the State generating information distortion at scale, separate from whatever screening value the review might produce. The system very incoherently trains its inputs, making it less effective than ever at discovery.

So it pushes away good candidates and becomes less effective at finding bad ones. Very on brand for Trump.