U.S. Wants Five Years Of Social Media From Visitors — New Visa Waiver Rules Will Drive Away Tourists And Cut Flights For Americans

The U.S. governnment is planning to make getting an ‘ESTA’ more cumbersome for foreign visitors, demanding five years of social media history in exchange for permission to enter the United States.

People coming from ‘visa waiver’ countries don’t go through the full visa process, but still need electronic permission – a ‘visa lite’. And U.S. Customs and Border Protection has filed a proposal for notice and comment adding a social media field to the form, with applicants required to “provide their social media from the last 5 years.” In addition, they’ll take down the ESTA website application process and make it mobile-only.

There are other new requirements as well:

• “High value data fields” added to ESTA: phone numbers (5 years), emails (10 years), IP/metadata from submitted photos, extensive family member information, and even “biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris,” plus business contact fields.

• CBP describes an optional “Voluntary Self-Reported Exit” feature that collects facial images and geolocation and uses biometric matching to confirm departure.

Press coverage is misreading this as applying to ‘all tourists’ or ‘all countries’ when this is limited to travelers from visa waiver countries entering on an ESTA. So not all travelers, and not all countries.

And the text of the rule does not say “5 years of social media history/activity.” It does not specify “posts,” “messages,” “likes,” “content,” or “passwords.” It says applicants must “provide their social media from the last 5 years.”

This likely cashes out as usernames, not a literal export of five years of content. However, the wording in the notice is sloppy enough that media headlines can plausibly overstate what’s happening. Coverage also understates the significance or ignores the move to mobile-only applications.

This Is Going To Be Messy

The lack of definition in scope is going to lead to unavoidable compliance errors and too broad a discretion for the agency. “Provide their social media from the last 5 years” is not a workable standard without a definition – there’s no list of platforms, discussion of how to handle multiple accounts or shared accounts, pseudonyms, deleted accounts, messaging apps and forums? This may mean arbitrary denials and inconsistent enforcement.

Self-reported social handles and long lookback windows generate low-quality data (forgotten accounts, typos, ambiguity, duplicates). That pushes the system toward either ignore the data or come up with bad results.

While there are countries today using mobile-only, this also creates complications (no smartphone, locked-down corporate phone, region/app store issues, NFC limitations, usability for older travelers).

With all the additional data collection, as well, anything “flagged” is likely to turn ESTA from near-instant to a days-long approval process.

Does This Actually Make Us Safer?

The strongest case for the proposed changes isn’t social media handle disclosure, it’s the mobile selfie identity-verification track. Currently, the agency says, poor-quality image uploads on the ESTA website have allowed applicants to bypass facial-comparison screening. They claim travelers exploit this.

In addition, the website cannot validate ePassport chip certificates, so a move to mobile-only supports chip verification and stronger document authentication.

The notice, though, does not contain evidence to support any security benefit to social media vetting. In fact, the only rationale provided is compliance with Executive Order 14161 – the President’s call for this. (They say they’re doing it because the President said to.)

In any case, making social media handle disclosure mandatory still runs up against the binding constraint of analysis capacity and false positives. Addressing those might improve vetting. Raw data isn’t lacking.

Instead, “face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris” included in the definition of high value data seems like both overreach and “collect everything we might ever want.”

This Is A Costly Effort

According to CBP’s filing, 14,484,073 ESTA Mobile submissions annually, at 22 minutes each, means 5,310,827 burden hours per year. At, say, $35 per hour that’s $186 million.

That doesn’t include the extra work of compiling five years of social accounts plus additional “high value” fields. Then there’s the additional manual view of submissions.

Plus, if CBP treats omissions from a five year history as suspicious, denial rates rise. If they don’t, the field becomes mostly performative.

My worry, though, is what this means for international visitors to the United States, and the resulting effects on flight options and jobs for Americans as well as economic growth.

• Visitors spend over $20 billion a month in the U.S. (each spends about $4,000)
  
• Even detering a few percentage points of trips could cost hundreds of millions to multiple billions
  
• And this comes on top of other recent measures like the June 2025 travel ban on high risk countries; the $250 “Visa Integrity Fee” and higher overall visa costs; elimination of third country visa renewal (people having to return to home country); tightening of student visas; and ideological screening.

And we’re aleady seeing a drop in international travel spending in the U.S. (for a variety of reasons). That means fewer flights. Air Canada has at least five U.S. routes for winter 2025–26 (secondary U.S. cities to Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) due to soft transborder demand. Porter has suspended routes. WestJet has shifted capacity to Europe. American Airlines is dropping New York JFK – Toronto in May.

Route cuts don’t just mean fewer seats for tourists. They also mean less cargo capacity, which tends to raise freight prices or push freight onto longer and less efficient routings. It reduces schedule convenience for U.S.-origin passengers (more connections, worse timings). And it makes it harder for U.S. carriers to sustain spokes and smaller markets that rely on feed from international traffic.

Other countries, by the way, may mirror these requirements for U.S. travelers as well, so it doesn’t just affect foreigners. And that exacerbates the effect.

Bottom-Line: It’s A Self-Own

There’s almost no serious, evidence-backed cost-benefit work in the public record for things like mandatory social-media handles for ESTA, the Visa Integrity Fee, or forcing in-person interviews for children and octogenarians. But these deter visitors, which reduces economic activity that supports flights for Americans and U.S. jobs. This looks “tough on foreigners” – at the expense of Americans.

I’m not saying it’s racism and xenophobia. There’s also security bias, performative toughness for domestic politics, and bureaucratic empire-building. But this isn’t a serious ‘America First’ policy.