On February 24, 2017, NPR reported that examining social media is one elements of Trump Administration’s extreme executive vetting on refugees.

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Social media vetting involves checking a list of website refugees visited and they would be asked to provide the password of their accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This screening began at the end of 2015 and the purpose is to check what the incoming refugees are looking at.

Initially, the targeted group is “the Syrian males who had some sort of flag in their application,” said Leon Rodriguez, who is the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But recently his agency kept “expanding the universe of people whose social media we examined, to include larger numbers of Syrian applicants and Iraqi applicants.”

The process is extremely time-consuming. It could take up to 8 hours to go over the file of one person, and any concerns in the file would lead to hold or rejection of the applicant.

But it is hard to determine how effective it is from now. If people became well-known that their profiles are be scrutinized, would they just delete the stuff on their social media accounts?