Should Canadians be worried about travelling to the USA

Many Canadians are in a mild panic over the "new" border requirements when crossing to the USA. US Customs and Border Protection say that travellers from countries that don't need a visa - which (for now, at least) includes Canadians - may be required to show five years worth of social media information to border agents before they are allowed in to Fortress America. The (unstated) assumption is that, if anything scurrilous is discovered - say, God forbid, a less-than-copacetic reference to Donald Trump - the travellers may be denied entry.

Thing is, this is not really a new policy. People who do need a visa (e.g. Chinese/Indian/etc visitors) have been subject to that for years, when they apply in advance for their visas. Even those visa-free visitors, like Canadians, could have been subject to such an online search any time in the last 20 years or so. In practice, though, it is extremely rare that such a search would be triggered, and you would have to be very suspicious in a whole bunch of other ways before it was.

Well, even with the new edict, the same applies. According to immigration experts, most people should just swan through customs and passport control, just as usual, with only the normal disapproving stares and snide comments of the border agent to bear. Only if you are otherwise suspect in some way would you be yanked of into secondary screening and potentially subjected to social media assessment. Of course, that "suspect" description applies to many more people nowadays than it used to, but we are assured that the "new" rules are not in fact new, they are just more likely to be strictly applied.

And, in case you were thinking about it, don't try and wipe your social media accounts from your phone before travelling, or travel with a clean, disposable "burner" phone. If there's one thing that will make you look suspicious, and raise a glaring red flag, that is it.

As for me, I have no intentions of travelling to the US any time soon, despite having a sister-in-law in New York, who we regularly used to visit. Which is probably just as well, because I don't have any social media accounts. I haven't had Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, or anything else of that ilk, for decades now, and certainly nothing really suspicious like BlueSky or Mastodon. Truth Social? Uh, no. I guess I do use WhatsApp to communicate with family, and there is probably some defamatory stuff on there. And if they were to find this blog - is this "social media"? - I would be well and truly sunk.