Tourists traveling to the United States from visa-waiver countries will be required to disclose five years of social media activity under a new Trump administration proposal that significantly expands digital vetting of foreign visitors.
The draft rule, issued by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), would make social media disclosure a mandatory part of the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) for citizens of 42 countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia. Applicants would be asked to list every social media account used in the last five years, alongside past phone numbers, email addresses and extensive biometric data.
CBP’s notice, to be published in the Federal Register, states that officials would also collect facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers through a revamped, app-only ESTA system. The change is intended to implement an executive order in which President Donald Trump directed agencies to ensure that visitors “do not bear hostile attitudes toward [the United States’] citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles.”
The new requirements build on earlier measures. Since 2019, most immigrant and non-immigrant visa applicants worldwide have been required to list their social media identifiers on State Department forms. More recently, the administration expanded online-presence screening for international students and exchange visitors, with consular guidance explicitly instructing them to disclose all platforms used in the past five years, including inactive accounts. The latest proposal would extend this more intrusive “extreme vetting” from higher-risk visa categories to millions of short-stay tourists who previously faced relatively light screening.
Travel and tourism industries warn the move could have a chilling effect just months before the 2026 World Cup, which the US will co-host with Canada and Mexico. Industry analysts told Skift the plan adds “a mandatory digital hurdle” for some of the country’s most valuable visitors and risks deterring “high-spend, low-risk” travelers. With FIFA expecting millions of fans to move between North American host cities, any confusion or delays around Esta could ripple across airlines, hotels and stadiums.
Civil liberties groups argue the proposal will pressure travelers to sanitize their online lives and punish lawful dissent. Privacy advocates at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) say that demanding social media histories as a condition of entry invites ideological screening and “inevitably encourages self-censorship,” echoing earlier ACLU warnings that passwords and posts should not become de facto visa requirements.
The proposal lands amid a broader surge in border technology. Official CBP statistics show searches of electronic devices at ports of entry have more than quadrupled over the past decade, rising from roughly 8,500 in 2015 to over 46,000 in 2024. Wired recently reported that nearly 15,000 phones and laptops were examined in a single quarter this year, the highest figure on record.
A separate analysis by the Center for Democracy and Technology notes that data scraped from devices can be stored in DHS databases for up to 15 years and accessed by thousands of officials. Rights groups warn that combining long-term device data with five years of social media histories could create a powerful, opaque surveillance infrastructure with little judicial oversight.
European governments and regulators are also scrutinizing the plan. Outlets in France, Ireland and the UK have highlighted tensions between the US proposal and European data-protection norms, noting that blanket collection of social media identifiers could conflict with principles of necessity and proportionality under EU law. Data-transfer arrangements between the EU and US, already fragile after previous court challenges, could face renewed legal tests if European travelers’ online identities are systematically harvested and stored in US systems.
Supporters of the policy within the administration frame it as a logical extension of existing national-security tools. Officials argue that open-source intelligence and social media analysis have become central to threat assessments and that treating citizens of wealthy allies differently from other visitors is increasingly hard to justify. One senior homeland security official, speaking to US media, said the goal was to “ensure that the privilege of visa-free travel is reserved for individuals who do not pose security or public-order risks.”
Critics counter that the dragnet is both overbroad and ineffective. Security experts caution that sophisticated actors can easily scrub or compartmentalize their online presence, while ordinary tourists—students, families and retirees—will bear the brunt of the new bureaucracy. Tourism bodies fear that, combined with rising fees and already aggressive border checks, the proposal will further erode the United States’ reputation as an open, welcoming destination.
The CBP notice triggers a 60-day public comment period, during which civil-liberties groups, tech companies, foreign governments and industry associations are expected to weigh in.Legal challenges are considered likely if the rule is finalized in its current form, setting up a high-stakes clash between national-security arguments and evolving global norms on privacy and free expression in the digital age.
