RE: Governments trying to analyze social media posts before granting VISAs
Government has been working with social media, (read: strong-arming them when they find it "necessary") for as long as there have been social media platforms, to mine their data for information.
Yes, some have balked, like Twitter, but in the end, all have acquiesced.
I have personally been a privacy advocate since long before Edward Snowden's revelations of ongoing systemic misconduct, including massive illegal data collecting.
I immediately ditched Gmail, since Google was on record as willingly complying with their illegal requests, and switched to Protonmail.com, which is end-to-end encrypted by default.
Protonmail was started by data scientists and engineers from MIT and CERN, shortly following Snowden's disclosures, who felt that everyone deserves access to secure email. Protonmail is hosted in Switzerland, which has among the strongest privacy laws, and has the legal teeth to enforce them.
Protonmail has both free and paid levels; for most casual users, the free version will work just fine.
Recently, they have added ProtonVPN, which allows your internet activity to be far more secure as well. They have free and paid versions of ProtonVPN as well, but in this case I highly recommend the paid version, which is far faster.
Protonmail neither logs user activity nor keeps user passwords, so if they get a request for a user's data, they literally have nothing to hand over.
I have paid versions of both, which allows me to connect up to 5 devices to the VPN, and gives me five email addresses, all for $12 per month, which is far cheaper than some substandard VPNs out there.
And no, I'm not affiliated with the company, I am just a VERY satisfied customer.
Bottom line, I love my country, but distrust ALL governments. And they keep proving me correct in that assessment.
As George Carlin correctly noted, if it comes from the government, it's probably bullshit.