Amazon is one of many American companies scrambling to adapt to the Trump administration's rapid-fire changes to the H-1B visa program, including a mandate that consular officers must review visa applicants' social media posts before issuing visas. The additional screening has delayed processing, and some embassies and consulates have rescheduled visa appointments by several months, leaving some employees stranded outside the country.
When I met Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during her visit to the U.S. in July 2024, she told me she never reads or watches the news because she doesn’t want the media to influence her approach to governing. Instead, she travels her country and hears directly from citizens. What a beautiful idea.
My New Year’s resolution is to do something similar: I plan to become a social-media teetotaler in 2026.
On New Year’s Eve, I deleted X and Instagram from my phone. I’ll spend my newfound time listening to more voters in real-world Ohio, developing more policies to make our state affordable, and being more present with my family. I predict that ending my consumption of social media will make me a better leader and a happier man.
My campaign team will still use social media to distribute messages and videos on my behalf. But I won’t browse any of it myself. There’s a fine line between using the internet to distribute your message and inadvertently allowing constant internet feedback to alter your message. That isn’t using social media; it’s letting social media use you.
As someone who ran a digitally centered campaign for president, I’ve seen this effect firsthand—on myself and my competitors. Politicians want to respond to voters, and rightly so. But polls are expensive and infrequent. Social media offers a tempting alternative: free, abundant real-time feedback. It creates the impression that you’re hearing directly from “the people” and responding in kind. Modern social media is increasingly disconnected from the electorate. The messages you’re most likely to see are the most negative and bombastic, because they’re most likely to receive rapid “likes” and “reposts”—and that drives revenue for social media content creators.
If you click on one post about a topic, suddenly that viewpoint appears everywhere you look, skewing your view of reality. That’s harmless if you’re a knitting hobbyist who might overestimate how many fellow citizens know the difference between a knit and a purl stitch. On its own, random people saying outrageous things on the internet, and even making money from it, isn’t a major problem. But when those in power mistake online commentary for real-world consensus, they make decisions based on a distorted picture of what those citizens really want.
Worse, the online “pulse” that politicians glean from social media is increasingly manufactured by foreign actors and nonhuman bots. A recent report revealed that engagement with the X account of the now-notorious white nationalist Nick Fuentes shows signs of being “unusually fast, unusually concentrated and unusually foreign in origin.” Another investigation showed that hundreds of bots drove the pro-Democrat #BlueCrew hashtag, amplifying false claims that the assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pa., was staged. Politicians who think they’re taking social media cues from U.S. citizens are often mistaken.
My experience at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in December was a case in point. I delivered a speech arguing that the U.S. is a nation defined above all by ideals, not shared bloodlines. Based on social-media comments beforehand, I expected to be booed. If you scrolled through them after, you’d believe that’s what happened. But in reality, I received a standing ovation from a politically engaged audience of well over 20,000 attendees.
In 2025 I saw a spate of shocking racial slurs and worse on social media. Yet that same year I visited tens of thousands of voters across all of Ohio’s 88 counties—from inner cities to farms, union halls to factories, Republican rallies to one-on-one discussions with protesters—and I didn’t hear a single bigoted remark from an Ohio voter the entire year.
Social media’s warped projection of reality is reinforced inside modern government. Political staffers on both sides of the aisle skew young and hyper-attuned to social media. Twitter was built to imitate real-life conversations, but in modern younger political circles, real-life conversations are imitating Twitter.
As political commentator Richard Hanania observed last year, young political aides now compete to be the most “based,” one-upping each other with increasingly unhinged positions on race, sex and who the good guys were in World War II. If you’ve ever winced at a social-media post by an official government account, remember that the person who wrote it is often a young employee who takes most of his cues from the internet. Over time, the state itself begins to sound like X.
None of this is to say citizens shouldn’t use social media to sway politicians. It’s their constitutional right to do so. But it’s up to elected leaders to know what they’re responding to. Most Ohioans I’ve met want higher take-home pay, lower electric bills, and a great education that prepares their kids to join the workforce. Yet it’s precisely because these issues are so universal that they are among the least likely to register on social media. Leaders who depend on social media to gauge public opinion are looking through a broken mirror.
Thomas Jefferson famously observed: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth.” Yes, traditional media is flawed. Broadcasters push narratives, and sensationalism sells on TV and in print. But social media presents a new problem: coordinated influence that hides behind armies of avatars, creating a false impression of grassroots support. Its organic feel, combined with real-time feedback loops, makes its effects on elected leaders even more pernicious than other forms of media.
The result is that some of the most powerful politicians in America live under constant pressure to please social media—an unenviable confinement that we might call Twitter prison. Real leaders must break free. It’s fashionable these days for leaders to complain about the influence of social media on politics, but do nothing to fix it. Yet the first step doesn’t even require new laws. We just need to practice what we preach.
That’s easier said than done. If my current New Year’s resolution resembles past ones, I might be back to scrolling X by March. But for now I’m running the experiment, and I invite my fellow Republicans to join me. Who knows, it might be the extra X-factor that helps us secure victories in 2026.
Mr. Ramaswamy, a Republican, is a candidate for Ohio governor.
I’ll spend my newfound time listening to more voters in real-world Ohio, developing more policies to make our state affordable, and being more present with my family
"I need to listen to people so I can' develop more policies"
Why do you need to listen to people? You don't know what they want already? Are you that disconnected?
Statements like that are supposed to sound compassionate or something. But the older I get, the more it annoys me. I was pretty annoyed when Obama went on his initial "I have a plan" tour. That pissed me off too.
A dispute that began over heating a dish in a microwave has ended with two Indian students winning a $200,000 settlement from a US university.
Aditya Prakash and his fiancee, Urmi Bhattacheryya, told the BBC they filed a civil rights lawsuit against the University of Colorado, Boulder, after they faced a series of "microaggressions and retaliatory actions" following the microwave incident.
The harassment began, the lawsuit alleged, after a university staff member objected to Prakash heating up his lunch of palak paneer - one of northern India's most popular dishes, made of pureed spinach and paneer (considered an Indian equivalent of cottage cheese) - in a microwave on campus, because of the way it smelled.
In response to the BBC's questions, the university said it could not comment on the "specific circumstances" surrounding the students' claims of discrimination and harassment due to privacy laws, but added it was "committed to fostering an inclusive environment for all students, faculty and staff regardless of national origin, religion, culture and other classes protected under US laws and by university policies".
"When these allegations arose in 2023, we took them seriously and adhered to established, robust processes to address them, as we do with all claims of discrimination and harassment. We reached an agreement with the students in September [2025] and deny any liability in this case," the university said.
Prakash said for them, the point of the lawsuit was not the money. "It was about making a point - that there are consequences to discriminating against Indians for their 'Indianness'."
The lawsuit has received significant media coverage in India since it was first reported last week, starting a conversation around what many have described as "food racism" in Western countries. Many Indians on social media have shared their own experiences of facing ridicule over their food habits abroad.
Some have also pointed out that discrimination over food is rampant in India as well, where non-vegetarian food is banned in many schools and colleges over perceptions of it being impure or dirty. People from disadvantaged castes and north-eastern states often face bias over their food habits, with some complaining about the smell of the ingredients they use.
And it's not just Indian or South Asian food - communities from Africa, Latin America and other parts of Asia have also shared their experiences of being shamed over their food habits.
Prakash and Bhattacheryya claim their ordeal began in September 2023. Prakash, a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at the university, was microwaving his lunch of palak paneer when a British staff member allegedly remarked that his food was giving off a "pungent" odour and told him that there was a rule against heating foods with strong odours in that microwave.
Prakash said the rule wasn't mentioned anywhere and when he later inquired about which foods were considered pungent, he was told that sandwiches were not, while curry was.
Prakash alleged that the exchange was followed by a series of actions by the university which led to him and Bhattacheryya - who was also a PhD student there - losing their research funding, teaching roles and even the PhD advisers they had worked with for months.
In May 2025, Prakash and Bhattacheryya filed a lawsuit against the university, alleging discriminatory treatment and a "pattern of escalating retaliation" against them.
In September, the university settled the lawsuit. Such settlements are usually arrived at to avoid lengthy and expensive court battles for both parties.
According to the terms of the settlement, the university agreed to give the students their degrees but denied all liabilities and banned them from studying or working there in future.
In its statement shared with the BBC, the university added: "CU Boulder's Anthropology Department has worked to rebuild trust among students, faculty and staff. Among other efforts, department leaders met with graduate students, faculty and staff to listen and discuss changes that best support the department's efforts to foster an inclusive and supportive environment for all."
"Individuals who are determined to be responsible for violating university policies preventing discrimination and harassment are held accountable," it added.
Prakash says that this isn't his first brush with discrimination over food.
When he was growing up in Italy, his school teachers would often ask him to sit at a separate table during lunch breaks because his classmates found the smell of his food "off-putting", he says.
"Acts like isolating me from my European classmates or stopping me from using a shared microwave because of how my food smells are how white people control your Indianness and shrink the spaces you can exist in," he says.
He adds that there is a long history of food being used to put down Indian and other ethnic groups.
"The word 'curry' has been conflated with the 'smell' of marginalised communities who toil in kitchens and peoples' homes and has been turned into a pejorative term for 'Indian'," he says.
Bhattacheryya says that even someone like former Vice-President Kamala Harris isn't immune to being insulted over food.
She points to a 2024 social media post by far-right activist Laura Loomer saying that if Harris became president, the White House "will smell like curry". Loomer has denied being racist.
In the lawsuit, Bhattacheryya also alleged she faced retaliation after she invited Prakash to speak as a guest lecturer on the topic of cultural relativism in her anthropology class. Cultural relativism is the view that no culture is superior or inferior to another as cultural practices of all groups exist within their own cultural context.
During the lecture, Prakash says he shared several examples of food racism he had encountered, including the palak paneer incident, without naming anyone.
Bhattacheryya says that she also faced racist abuse when she posted a thread on X about the "systemic racism" she and Prakash were facing at the university in 2024.
Below the post, there are several comments supporting the couple but also ones that said, "go back to India", "decolonisation was a mistake" and "it's not just the food, many of you don't bathe and we know".
Prakash and Bhattacheryya said what they wanted from the university was to be heard and understood; for their hurt and pain at being "othered" to be acknowledged and for amends to be made in a meaningful way.
They claim that they never received a meaningful apology from the university. The university did not respond to the BBC's question about this.
They have since returned to India and say that they might never go back to the US.
"No matter how good you are at what you do, the system is constantly telling you that because of your skin colour or your nationality, you can be sent back any time. The precarity is acute and our experience at the university is a good example of this," Prakash says.
Smucky, the cat eating appendix
