A digital confessional for the unsuspecting

Just when we thought the American political saga had reached its maximum absurdity, the Trump administration has managed, with barely concealed sleight of hand and a wry smile, to turn the First Amendment into both a delayed Fourth of July celebration and a brazen stick-up. An incredulous world populace has been presented with the same scripture, but a different sermon depending on which side of the customs' desk you're standing. The apparent contradiction has passed them by, so they preach freedom of speech to the world on Monday, then demand five years of a potential visitor's tweets by Friday. 

The new ESTA requirements - and I love how they keep insisting nothing's really changed, reminiscent of a burglar who might suggest he's merely "checking your windows" - will essentially transform a tourist visa application into the world's most invasive personality test. You know the sort: except instead of "what's your favourite colour?" it's "please provide every stupid thing you've ever posted online, including that photo from Benidorm where you're wearing a sombrero and holding a traffic cone".

Hand it all over. The drunken tweets. The midnight arguments about Irish independence that nobody asked for. That time you shared an article without reading past the headline. The Instagram story from your cousin's wedding, where you may or may not have been photographed near someone holding a Palestinian flag. Every digital turd you've dropped in the last half-decade, all nicely packaged for some homeland security operative in Tucson who thinks irony is something you do to shirts.

It's genius, really, how they've found a way to make nosiness sound like national security. What makes it especially beautiful is watching America bang on about European censorship while building what amounts to a digital Berlin Wall around its own borders. As denizens of the European Union, we are reminded that our ever-strident Brussels is, according to Washington's present narrative, busy strangling free speech with its fussy hate speech laws and platform regulations, turning the entire continent into one enormous safe space where you can't even properly insult someone without triggering 17 different EU directives. We may be living that reality, but, by contrast, America, we are being led to believe, stands alone. The last cowboy. The First Amendment pinned to its chest like a sheriff's badge.

Except this narrative is completely false.

What America's proposing is far more menacing than anything the Europeans have dreamt up. When Brussels bans something, at least they have the decency to tell you. There's a law. You can read it. Hate it. Challenge it in court. Vote for someone else. It might be censorship, but it's identifiable censorship, which is almost refreshing in its brutal simplicity.

The American version is far more opaque. They will not inform you which tweet led to your being blacklisted or explain which photo triggered the algorithm. You will simply be denied entry, without explanation, without appeal, on grounds of "additional concerns", which could mean anything from "you once retweeted the wrong journalist" to "the computer didn't like your face". Censorship, but with customer service training. Tyranny, but politely worded.

And you'll have done all their work for them by having spent years carefully documenting every thought, whim, and passing fury, helpfully arranged by date with GPS coordinates attached. The Stasi would have wept with envy, all that effort building files on people when you could simply have asked them to build their own and email them in.

Trump's people keep claiming that visiting America is an inestimable privilege, not a right. Nobody's disputing that, but the question isn't whether America gets to control its borders (of course it does); the question is what it means when America, of all countries, starts treating tourists' social media accounts like criminal records. America, the place that lectures everyone else about freedom, the country that can't get through a presidential speech without mentioning liberty at least six times. That America.

You can't do both. You can't portray yourself as the beacon of free expression and simultaneously treat people's Twitter history as proof of thought crime. You can't wave the First Amendment at Europe like a crucifix while maintaining a system that teaches millions of people to self-censor in case they might travel to Las Vegas. You can't preach liberty while demanding access to people's digital diaries as the price of admission.

Well, you can. Trump's doing it. It's just so two-faced it's almost impressive, like watching someone rob a bank while wearing a "Honesty is the Best Policy" t-shirt.

The real poison isn't even the privacy invasion, though God knows that's bad enough. It's what this does to people before they ever touch the application form. Young Europeans will stop treating social media as a place for actual human expression. It'll become a permanent job interview for a position they might apply for in five years. That article criticising American healthcare? Better not share it. That joke about Trump, best delete it. That 2am argument about Gaza after too much wine? Future-you, trying to visit a relative in Boston, will be absolutely furious.

This is how you teach an entire generation to police themselves. You don't need watchtowers when people build their own prisons.

And what exactly are they screening for in this archaeological dig through our digital nonsense? Social media is where humans go to be their absolute worst selves, where they show off, lie, share things they don't understand, try on other people's anger like it's a fancy dress, and perform the sort of hysterical outrage that will inevitably embarrass their older selves. Judging someone's character by their Twitter feed is like assessing their suitability as a brain surgeon by watching them play Operation. You're mistaking the performance for the person.

But that's not really the point, is it? The point is control. The point is making sure everyone knows the border guard is always watching, even when you're in a pub in Galway posting photos of your lunch. The point is turning social media from a place where humans are messy and stupid and recklessly themselves into a permanent liability, a minefield that you've been laying for yourself one post at a time.

Meanwhile, Trump's administration continues its European tour, wagging its finger at the continent for insufficient commitment to free speech. It's like being given marriage guidance by someone who's been divorced five times.

And they are only warming up. Coming attractions include full family trees (drawn in paranoia rather than affection), complete phone histories, ten years of email addresses, and DNA samples, though quite how one submits DNA remains unclear. Do you lick the screen? Post a swab? Perhaps they'll create an app. GenomeShare: connecting your chromosomes to homeland security since 2025.

America used to sell itself as the place where you could escape who you'd been and become who you wanted to be, or who you could never be in your home country. Where your past stayed in the past, and your future was yours to invent unimpeded. But the once-glorious American Dream has become increasingly unattainable, as the gatekeepers to the land of promise now embrace the right to demand a complete forensic examination of five years of your digital digestion and exhaust fumes as the price of entry, treating your online history like destiny written in code.

Unfortunately, for those wandering globe-trotters wanting to experience America's delights, it has instead morphed into the land of the paranoid whose gatekeepers are busy building their digital moat, one Instagram story at a time, transforming their border into an ideological checkpoint while calling it security. They're creating a system where the price of seeing America is proving that you've never said anything remotely interesting, or even mildly critical of the American political establishment. And they're doing all this while lecturing the rest of us about freedom.

It's quite something to witness, the cognitive dissonance required is almost athletic.

Pack carefully or don't pack at all. Stay home and have a pint in Mayo. Nobody's going to demand your Twitter password at Knock Airport. Not yet, anyway. Give them time.