Excerpt:
The State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) is looking at how it can use information from Facebook and other social networks to help inform asylum decisions, reports the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.
“From the information that asylum seekers publish on social networks, it may be possible to draw conclusions that may be of importance for the asylum procedure such as references to family relationships,” SEM spokesperson Martin Reichlin told the newspaper. “The State Secretariat for Migration has therefore set up an internal working group to clarify whether, how and under what conditions publicly accessible information from social networks can and should be collected and used in the processing of asylum applications.”
This follows the case of a Nigerian man who applied for asylum in Switzerland in December 2016, claiming he was being persecuted in his home country.