Should I make my social media private?
Now, having teenage kids, I see how they act on social media and actually my kids are pretty tame. We've had situations in the past where clients have come to us and talk to us about social media mishaps that they've had, that they're worried about Immigration or the State department finding out about.
And so generally whether you're going through the immigration process or not, you need to be careful about what you put out there on social media.
Everything's being tracked, everything's being recorded.
You know, kids make mistakes these days.
Young people make mistakes these days and it's much more of a big deal than it was back when I was a kid.
Back then, no one was walking around with a phone, which is really a camera and recording every single thing that happens.
Amany and I were watching The Morning Show last night and Steve Carell's character had a meltdown and it was all captured on video and so did Reese Witherspoon's character.
So things are different now and so you need to be careful about what you have on social media.
If you're going through the immigration process, either for your citizenship or for your green card, if you're trying to bring a spouse from overseas, it's very likely that Government officials, either the State Department or USCIS might be looking at your social media.
We could tell you many stories about immigrants who've been questioned about things that have been seen on their social media posts.
So, before you file any kind of immigration application, you really want to scrub your social media clean.
There's no obligation that you keep that stuff up and you're free to, make whatever you want, public or private.
You should make it as private as you can.
And certainly while you're going through the process, but just generally in life, you want to be careful about what you post.
So if you're going through any kind of process, if you're going through citizenship, you don't want to do anything or post anything that shows that you might be a person of bad moral character.
If you're going through the marriage based process of either adjusting status here in the United States or trying to bring a spouse here from overseas, then you're definitely going to want to make sure that you don't have any questionable photos on your social media sites that the State department officials or the USCIS officials could access.
So just be smart.
You can always post stuff later.
You can always post stuff just to your friends.
There are social media apps that let you keep things private.
Facebook is pretty wide open and you know, it's amazing what you can find about people.
Sometimes we do our own social media checks and one time we figured out that someone who was telling us that they were married to person A was actually married to person B and so we had to fire that client.
So social media can really be a wonderful thing.
People can connect and share in ways that you never thought possible before, but it also comes with it's own risks that you need to think about and you need to think through if you're going through the immigration process.
If you have questions about social media or if you need advice about going through the immigration process and how your social media might affect that, give us a call at (314) 961-8200 you can email us at [email protected].
Be sure to join us on our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home.
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