Trump’s Social Media Surveillance: Social Scoring by Another Name

Petra Molnar is the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in The Age of Artificial Intelligence, published by The New Press in 2024.

My friend Nadine tells me the apple trees have been blossoming in Ramallah. She sends me a video of her yard, where she weaves red and black thobes, traditional Palestinian dresses adorned with red stars of Bethlehem. She also embroiders keffiyehs, the now-ubiquitous symbol of Palestinian resistance.

If I share Nadine’s photos on my social media, will they get me deported from the United States?

In March 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched an AI-fueled "Catch and Revoke" effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups. This program relies on the AI to scrape people’s social media to revoke visa applications of people who have been protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. As of early April 2025, at least 600 people have apparently had their visas revoked because of this AI monitoring, a massive incursion into people’s right to free speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to protest.

The speed with which social media monitoring is growing is staggering. As of March 2025, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has been working with web-scraping contractor ShadowDragon to pull data from over 200 different sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web to map out a person’s activity, movements, and relationships.

On April 9, 2025, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services also announced that it will begin monitoring immigrants’ social media accounts for perceived antisemitism. On April 16, 2025, 404 Media reported ICE contracted with tech-giant Palantir Technologies for tens of millions of dollars to modify its powerful database and search tool to allow “complete target analysis of known populations” and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities to support Trump’s detention and deportation machine.

Later that day, Politico obtained a State Department cable stating that US consulates around the world must “conduct social media vetting for all visa applicants with presence in the Gaza Strip” since January 1, 2007, applying equally from aid workers to diplomats, under the guise of identifying terrorists and national security threats.

On April 17, 404 Media reported that the full leaked dossier of internal Palantir slack chats and message boards show that Palantir is now a “more mature partner to ICE,” actively helping to find the locations of people flagged for deportation, while downplaying a Palantir employee’s concerns surrounding the ethics of making these tools available to fuel Trump’s deportation machine.

History of social media surveillance

However, this type of social media scraping is nothing new. As I show in my book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, these practices have been used before. Previous examples include the Extreme Vetting Initiative during the so-called Muslim Ban, which was introduced by the first Trump Administration, where risk profiles were created on a person based on their online activity under the guise of anti-­ terrorism and security operations.

In 2017, ICE launched its much-lauded Extreme Vetting Initiative, a process of automated assessments that examined a person’s social media profile, risk profiles, travel records, and other factors to determine the probability that an applicant would be a “positively contributing member of society” and to national interests, and “predict whether they intend to commit criminal or terrorist acts after entering the country.” The AI system, which was developed after Trump’s executive order in January 2017 calling for strict screening rules and slashing travel from several majority-­Muslim countries—­the so-called Muslim ban—­was expected to flag thousands of people a year for deportation investigations and visa denials based on vague criteria of risk or crime prediction, without making the factors used for those determinations publicly available. After public outcry and various civil society groups writing an open letter arguing that this initiative was “tailor-­made for discrimination,” this initiative was shelved in 2018—until it reappeared in this new iteration in 2025.

Furthermore, people’s social media accounts have also been screened if they wish to enter the United States, depending on the visa on which they entered. As of April 2019, the US State Department requires visa applicants to disclose their social media account information for the past five years from the date of application. And in September 2019, DHS even tried to get this type of disclosure from people who are non-­ citizens that were already living in the US and applying for immigration benefits, including naturalization, permanent residence, and asylum.

Social media screening is troubling not only because it is highly intrusive, but also because of US immigration enforcement’s demonstrated track record of using social media information in a manner that disproportionately harms members of minority racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Even before the current ramp-up of AI-fueled surveillance, DHS had already falsely accused Black and Latinx youth of gang membership by exploiting social media connections, resulting in their detention, deportation, and/or denial of immigration benefits. ICE has also frequently combed social media to support gang membership allegations. In one case, the evidence DHS presented in its allegation of gang affiliation was a Facebook photo of an immigrant youth wearing a Chicago Bulls hat. Social media screening also disproportionately affects people belonging to or presumed to be of Muslim faith or Arab descent by creating an infrastructure rife with mistaken inference and guilt-­by-­association. Enlivened by the fears of further terrorist attacks after 9/11, and now allegations of anti-semitism since the start of the Gaza genocide, the importation of Islamophobia into immigration policy justifies increasingly broader surveillance under the guise of insecurity. And it may not even be your own social media that gets you in trouble. In 2019, CBP denied a Palestinian college student entry to the country based on his friend’s Facebook posts expressing political views against the US, even though he himself did not post such views.

But the US is also not alone in these practices. Various other jurisdictions, such as New Zealand, have experimented with using automated facial recognition technology to identify future so-called “troublemakers,” which civil society organizations opposed on the grounds of discrimination and racial profiling (this project has since been shelved, for now). Germany has also been leading the charge, monitoring people’s social media profiles for Palestinian sentiments, denying German citizenship to people for sharing Palestinian slogans, and deporting pro-Palestinian EU citizens. Last summer, while on a research fellowship in Berlin, I even noticed social media sites actively blocking videos of bombardments in Gaza and resulting protests in the streets of Berlin, forever loading until I switched on my Canadian VPN.

Beyond the immediate immigration repercussions, like being denied entry, detention, and deportation, this type of monitoring infringes several human rights. Monitoring social media activities can lead to unwarranted surveillance of individuals and communities, particularly those who have historically been marginalized, infringing on their privacy rights. If individuals and communities feel they are being monitored, they may also self-censor or refrain from expressing their thoughts and opinions freely, thus hindering their right to free speech. Monitoring of social media can also discourage people from organizing or participating in protests or assemblies due to fear of repercussions. If certain viewpoints are suppressed or censored based on monitoring practices, it undermines the public’s overall right to receive and disseminate information—crucial activities, particularly during times of major upheaval.

Social scoring by another name

However, there are also additional insidious impacts of social media scraping and subsequent profiling. Nanjala Nyabola, author of Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move, refers to these practices as “social scoring by any other name.” In her essay Periodic Offerings to the Visa Gods, Nyabola shows that these practices are evident in the way that immigration regimes have long been able to control who enters through a “cruel-money-making machine system [that] utilizes ritual humiliation to keep people in their places and legitimize a world order constructed by and favouring the Global North and whiteness.” By increasingly relying on AI and automation in immigration processing, these practices further dehumanization by creating rigid categories and risk profiles based on people’s backgrounds, associations, and now increasingly online behaviour.

With AI, that which gets repeated becomes gospel. I tested this out with various generative AI tools, asking the two programs a simple prompt: “What does a refugee look like?” These were the results—either forlorn and emaciated faces of Black children or else portraits of doe-eyed and vaguely Middle Eastern people waiting to be rescued. When I sent these depictions to a colleague who currently identifies as a refugee, she laughed and said, “I sure as hell hope I don’t look like this.”

These tech hallucinations are precisely what professor Dan McQuillan refers to in his book Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence as ‘bullshit engines’---the perfect tools for oppression and fascism and the reinscription of certain types of fantasies that are predicated on determining who is welcome and who is a threat. And these formulations could not be more explicit in the datasets that AI needs in order to learn. The ACLU was able to obtain a copy of ICE’s Orwellian-sounding “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide,” confirming the criteria used to create a risk profile on someone to determine whether they will be arrested and deported to a prison in El Salvador. Some of these criteria include being Venezuelan and 1) having a tattoo an ICE officer says is a "gang tattoo" and 2) displaying "logos," "symbols," or clothes an ICE officer says are gang signs.

But it is no longer enough to look at someone’s past behavior. In Rubio’s memo about Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student active in pro-Palestinian protests who has been forcibly disappeared and slated for deportation, it is not just past or current activities that can create a flag. It is also our “expected beliefs, statements, or associations,” echoing similar statements made by Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) on the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador: “maybe he’s not a terrorist. But he is a potential terrorist. He’s a terrorist watchlist person.”

Not even the powerful are immune

Historically marginalized communities will bear the disproportionate brunt of this type of social media surveillance: pro-Palestinian movements, Black and Brown communities, Indigenous land protesters, and international students whose right to remain in the United States is contingent on the whims of an administration more than happy to profit from their tuition dollars. People-on-the-move and migrant justice communities are also particularly vulnerable, as much communication and solidarity-building happens online or over social media. People have already been individually targeted, like Dr. Scott Warren in Arizona, for providing humanitarian aid in the Sonoran desert under the First Trump administration (luckily, Dr. Warren was eventually acquitted). Who may be next?

However, not even the powerful are immune to this type of monitoring. The escalation by the Trump Administration that singles out individuals, including former staffers or aids and through the targeting of law firms, shows that anyone perceived to be in opposition to the current administration is at risk, including perhaps an unlikely victim, Chris Krebs, the former former United States Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). In an Executive Order issued on April 9, 2025, President Trump called for a federal law enforcement investigation against Krebs, a private citizen, for speech protected by the First Amendment, directing the DHS and the US Attorney General to investigate Krebs' tenure at CISA. While the recent targeting is presented as a national security concern, the language used in the Executive Order against Chris Krebs shows that this type of targeting is indeed politically motivated, for example by publicly painting him as “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority.” This targeting of particular officials is clearly deliberate, singling out people who have criticized the Administration or those who have publicly spoken about issues that the President disagrees with. For example, Chris Krebs reaffirmed his statement from 2020, saying that the election, which Trump lost, was secure. He was then subsequently fired (via a Tweet) and faced with an Executive Order in seeming retaliation.

Social media surveillance, profiling, and targeting of individuals work to create a chilling effect on dissent and people’s ability to criticize the current administration, weakening healthy and critical discourse and free speech necessary in a constitutional democracy. This chilling effect will be particularly felt not only by individuals who may fear retaliation but also by the civil society sector as a whole, scared of speaking out for fear of reprisal or that they may be targeted next.

We are also witnessing a global backslide in the freedom of speech and in the targeting of dissent. The implications of this type of targeting in the United States will be felt internationally, empowering states with weak human rights records to crack down on dissent and free speech—precisely what the Trump Administration wants in its push to create a new global order based on repression and fear.

Some advice on what to do if you are asked for your phone and social media at the US border

Any electronic device you own, including phones, laptops, and tablets, can be checked at the US border. Sometimes, this means that customs officers will examine your device as is, but it can also involve attempting to download its data. This means that your device may be confiscated.

Is this an invasion of privacy? Yes, but if you are a visa holder (i.e., not a US citizen) and you refuse, you may be denied entry. If you are a US citizen, you will be permitted to enter, but your device may remain behind.

However, you are not required to share your password. You can set up tw- factor authentication and a long, secure password. But, if you refuse to give up your password, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers may take your phone and still not allow you into the country (this also applies to green card holders).

Some tips about what you can do:

1. Travel with a dedicated travel device – a different phone
2. If you must use your existing phone:
   • Backup important files and take them off your phone
   • Make a secure password and use two-factor authentication
3. Sign out of important applications or remove them from your phone altogether
4. Set up disappearing messages and consider switching to applications like Signal
5. Remove FaceID or biometric fingerprint reading from your device (I encourage everyone not to use biometric logins at all, even when not traveling)
6. Limit automatic cloud access
7. Or go one step further and encrypt your device
8. If your phone is taken, try to write down everything that happened, a rough timeline, and the names of officers you interacted with
9. Remain calm, do not argue.

Some people will say, ‘What’s the problem? I have nothing to hide.’ But the right to privacy is not just about avoiding scrutiny of wrongdoing. Widespread surveillance leads to abuses of power, discrimination, and the stifling of freedom of expression. The right to privacy also safeguards our fundamental right to personal autonomy and freedom from surveillance, rights which are increasingly coming under attack.

Additional guides have been published at The Guardian, Wired, and The Verge.