I can (and would) opt out of going to China.

I'm all set with authoritarian dictatorships with torture camps and organ harvesting.

This is grasping at straws. If you think the situation in US is anywhere remotely close to China, you are either under the influence of severe propaganda, or just don't know what's actually going on in both countries.

China has no actual rule of law and is a de facto authoritarian dictatorship.

I think people who say this forget about the “war on terror” and all the innocent civilians killed in drone stikes.

That is an entirely different thing. You're talking foreign policy, I'm talking domestic policy.

I think the point they were making is that if you decline to visit a region for moral reasons, then many other regions such as the US should also meet the abstract binary threshold even if they clearly aren't as bad.

So you say that as long as you kill foreigners it is ok comparatively to state killing their own?

Stopping noncitizens at the border for processing is a far cry from dragging millions of people out of their homes.

Would you classify the US treatment of Japanese citizens during WW2 as inhumane?

Back then, they were called war relocation centers. Right now, we call them concentration camps. Same thing will happen with the current camps, both in the US and China. In both cases, it's only the citizens of those countries that object to the usage of the term "concentration camps", while everyone else classifies them properly. Nobody in the history has called their own camps for what they truly are. Keeping people in inhumane conditions because the government identified their nationality as suspects is a terrible thing to do regardless of how that same government tries to spin it.

Those Japanese-American detainees had legal residential status when they were illegally rounded up without due process.

The detainees in the current border camps have no such status. Some of them are eventually admitted as refugees but there is no obligation to allow any of them to simply enter the country.

Presumably they would be permitted to leave the camps if they decided to go to a different country. If not, then the camps are in fact concentration camps. If so, then the comparison is hysterical political outrage that spits in the face of actual political detention.

> Those Japanese-American detainees had legal residential status when they were illegally rounded up without due process.

...and let me quote the SCOTUS decision in the Korematsu v. U.S. (1944):

> Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers—and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies— we are dealing specifically: with nothing but an exclusion order.

Do you not see the issue here?

The individuals being detained would not be permitted to leave the camps to simply go elsewhere. As per Section 1325 of Title 8 in the U.S. Code, they have committed a crime and are being detained on that basis.

What crime did the Japanese Americans commit.

I think it's far easier to offer up dummy social accounts (even for non-techies) vs being forced to install malware on your phone.

I am not very good at lying. I would not be able to look an officer in the eye and say that I wasn't on social media.

Leaving a posh phone at home to take my old phone I could do without moral complications. I could even say I left my posh phone at home because I didn't want it lost/stolen on my travels. That would not be lying even if the real reason was that I didn't want it violated by a customs officer.

What if you just say no? I don't use any social media and it can't be that unusual

IANAL but that could be interpreted as lying to a federal officer, given your participation in Hacker News discussions

But when internet forums count as social media, few can provide a complete list of websites they have engaged with.

I definitely can't recall every one of those I had been on in the last decades.

The law will have to define explicitly what it means to have an active social media account.

I wonder if one could truthfully state "no, I'm not on any social media [at this exact moment, since I'm talking to you and not actively using any social media]" and avoid any potential legal trouble, or if there's some clause or mechanism in whatever law applies here that's designed specifically to address intentionally misleading word choices.