With tweets like mine, I fear I’m going to be banned from Trump’s America

The same US government that was in uproar about Britons being arrested for ‘just tweets’ may now implement draconian border checks of social media activity that might reveal anything ‘un-American’. Sophie Wilkinson thinks she’ll just stay home instead…

Not content with turning US cities into migrant hunting grounds, or banning migrants from countries that I’m pretty sure he couldn’t locate on a map even if the reward was Sydney Sweeney wearing nothing but two Big Macs and a box of fries, the president of the United States has swivelled his attention towards tourists’ social media posts.

The upshot: if you fancy hopping on a cheap Norse flight to the States, you may have to submit links to your social media accounts. The US Customs and Border Protection will then scour five years’ worth of your sh*tposts to ensure you “do not bear hostile attitudes toward [the US’s] citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles”.

This follows a seismographically-signed executive order from Trump that also demands visitors provide 10 years’ worth of email addresses, biometric data and names of family members.

Oh dear. There are still retweets available of my once-viral “Donald Trump is afraid of stairs”. And there’s my more recent litany of Trump criticisms, stating that a court found him liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E Jean Carroll, that his attitude towards Ukraine and Zelensky is vile, and my joke that the exhumed corpse of Joan Rivers would be the better pick for Trump’s art and culture secretary.

Is all of that un-American, though? You have to wonder – especially if you’re going there. If you’d dissed McDonald’s – or Sydney Sweeney – does that count? If you make a joke about the Kardashians at customs, would that get you hauled into the special airport jail? Is it hostile to declare the maths behind baseball incredibly confusing? Could it be a barring offence to have confessed that you think tip culture and tiny bathroom stall doors are exploitative? Or would it be un-American to express shock – but no surprise – that children are gunned down in their schools as the US persists in protecting even the most homicidal thugs’ right to bear arms?

Donald Trump is demanding to see tourists’ social media posts... but my viral tweets about him are still available (Getty)

It is certainly enough to put the frighteners on anyone who actually wants to visit the country. That is probably the point. The FT recently reported that the European Commission provides official burner laptops and phones to staffers doing business in the US. This method of avoiding espionage attempts was once the reserve of those visiting China or Russia, but it will now be standard procedure for even laypeople heading to the States for a holiday.

I have family and friends in the US who have given me a fondness for large portions of bland dinners and Trader Joe’s peanut-butter-filled pretzel pieces. I have a bunch of cousins on the West Coast whom I’d particularly love to see. But deleting my silly posts would feel like capitulation.

The same right-wing Americans griping that the UK is arresting people for “just tweets”, the same Trump who called these kinds of arrests “sad…it’s not a good thing”. These people want to ban visitors who’ve had a spicy take or two? That’s rich. Of course, I take no truck with being rich. That would be extremely un-American.

The silver lining is that the US is facing an absolute burden of bureaucracy, border control lumbered with the digital equivalent of a personal 50-gallon seafood boil to pick through. The country received 22.1 million tourists last year. Imagining each has made a conservative – small c – 100 social media posts per year. That’s over 11 billion datapoints to scrutinise. AI might assist, but really, all that churning of clean water to simmer down servers gnashing away at our data… will that really Make America Great Again?

If America is a party, I am not sure I want to be invited anymore. I can imagine that many other millennials, who all learned the hard way that anything we said or did on social media could actually affect the rest of our lives, will feel similarly.

There could be a solution, though. I’ve long believed that the best way to undo something stupid said on the internet is to just bury the stupid under a tsunami of other stuff, something Boris Johnson has perfected. Why don’t prospective tourists follow suit? Just build a few accounts of nonsense gibberish AI memes brimming with a few squillion “6-7”s, then see border control wave you through, recognising not your criticisms of Trump, rather your contribution to social media’s newest frontier – slop. It worked for Elon Musk.