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Comment by misiti3780 | Hacker News Reader

The law is obviously offensively bad, and I do not support (dual citizen to the US), but I think the bigger problem here is any country can do this now -- and any of them that can get away with doing this will do it. The real solution is get the fuck off facebook.

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By this logic, when this administration starts discriminating people who are into programming ("they cause cyber terrorism," might be the excuse) we shall all "get the fuck off programming"?

In many cases social media accounts are like public records of your contacts. You're already giving your data to those companies and anyone who pays them to access it (depending on the TOS of the platform).

It feels different to me than "programming". But, I wouldn't be surprised if they checked my Github account or something... And if I don't want them to see my Github account, then yeah maybe I shouldn't have a public Github account.

i follow your logic but respectively disagree - there are so many good reasons delete your facebook account at this point - and lets face it, when they say "social media" they mean facebook

They probably also care about the videos you watch, the keyword you search, the private conversations you have on chat apps.

And your contacts...

Not when you say "I don't have a Facebook account" and promptly escorted into secondary inspection area at the border for more scrutiny.

I think your logic is flawed, Facebook is nothing more than a self maintained state surveillance dossier that naive fools have been tricked into participating in. As Zuckerberg famously said early on "I can't believe these idiots are giving me all their information" (paraphrased). No dictator or other authoritarian regime of all of history could have even ever dreamed in their wildest state of imagination that people would willingly participate in such a self-surveillance system. It's really rather bonkers and only a symptom of the human detachment from reality that surrounds them.

Don't forget the CIAs venture capital firm helped many of today's tech giants getnoff the ground, including Facebook. Along with NSLs, upstream node collection, and the history of The Company using famous actors/CEOs, Its worth remebering Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, are all much less independent private companies and are much more useful tools for the state.

The real solution is to finally realise what these dynamics have slowly been amounting to for about 16 years now – a "death by a thousand cuts":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normality

"any of them that can get away with doing this will do it"

I'd hope some or even many countries would opt out of these restrictions as an incentive to tourism and business.

The intelligentsia of the east has always run west away from totalitarian regimes and these regimes have stood the test of time. All of central Asia has been controlled by totalitarian regimes since before democracy was invented. If the US becomes totalitarian, then where will the intelligentsia go? Is there going to be an ever shrinking realm of freedom? Perhaps north west Europe will be the last refuge? Hardly seems to be an appealing thought.

This story is specific to "immigrants", not tourists.

Tourists are already treated like they're trying to be immigrants. Ask your Mexican friends that got denied entry trying to visit Disneyland because the border agent was in a bad mood.

Reading your other comments in this submission, it doesn't sound like you know many non-Americans who have experience with the US border.

> Reading your other comments in this submission, it doesn't sound like you know many non-Americans who have experience with the US border.

From my understanding it's different depending on where you're visiting from. And, yes, I know non-Americans who visit people here (not sure what comments of mine you got that idea from).

if i understand correctly, your solution is to erase your public social media footprint

wouldn't that be a form of free speech suppression?

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