ESTA is an application for permission to travel to the US by air carrier or cruise ship to apply for admission under the Visa Waiver Program. As the word Waiver suggests, that permission is not a visa.

People of VWP nationalities can apply for true US visas, but for short-term tourist or business visits there's usually no reason for them to bother unless they've been individually denied VWP eligibility or they want one of the few extra procedural rights which come from the visa and not through the VWP.

All of which is to say, maybe they're only asking this horrible new question of true visa applicants and not VWP applicants.

I’d wager VWP visitors outnumber Visa applicants by a wide margin. Assuming they actually intend to perform even a cursory check of each social media account they’ll get bogged down for hours by trying to prove someone lying about not having a certain account.

As an aside: someone posted a screenshot of the form showing one of the named sites was MySpace but doesn’t include Telegram (and you can use Telegram without a username too). Anyway - I hope someone comes to their senses (perhaps an ACLU lawsuit re: should people be forced to disclose membership of sites like Grindr?) and they remove the stupid question.

My guess (pure speculation) is that they won't manually check most social media accounts indicated on the form, but will automatically check the provided info against (and add the provided info to) some intelligence community database. Then they'd manually check any cases where security concerns are flagged by that database or otherwise.