Yeah…no expectation of privacy during the application process.
I hope this encourage more people to minimize their social media footprint. Not sure how the US government will investigate deleted Instagram stories or accounts under pseudonyms though.
Just my two cents, everyone should have at least one or two normal accounts to give to anyone asking for them. Keep the actual opinions behind closed doors or accounts not tied to your identity.
Even if I wanted to go to the USA and risk ICE detention, that’s probably 20 different usernames for me. Not one of them was in my name.
I honestly already would have trouble remembering all of them! 
So, no visit to the U.S. anytime soon, I guess.
Like, who is going to remember all their social media usernames? Do I need to give out my throwaway accounts as well?
Too complicated to be enforced. Hopefully, the next administration can revert this or literally every single student can be rejected for forgetting about one single username.
That reminds me, perhaps this is intentional. Having plausible deniability to reject anyone they don’t like even if their backgrounds or motivations won’t otherwise be grounds for rejection.
One can always make another one right now and use it casually just to add a few casual posts and pictures here and there.
But I wonder how they will think and deal with folks who don’t have social media for folks who are middle aged and older or even younger who maintain a healthy digital lifestyle.
I’m sure there are middle-aged academics, aspiring graduate students, and scholars who may be impacted by these visa changes! Chances are, everyone has at least one dead social media account. The only real explanations for this not being the case would be never owning an account in the first place or to actively delete them all. The latter possibility is more likely and therefore will appear suspicious.
I think the main assumption is that: everyone MUST have some social media account. Gen Z is almost guaranteed to have one. If you don’t, it will look suspicious. A lot of visa interviews are purely based off vibes (for example, if they think you are likely to overstay a student visa if you namedrop a US relative for some reason)