When Gov. Greg Abbott banned TikTok from the devices of state government employees in December 2022, Texas public universities braced for the inevitable restrictions that will come for everyone else on campuses where the app is hugely popular.
On Tuesday, January 17th, students at the University of Texas at Austin received an email that their favorite, hated, time-consuming, and fulfilling—depending on who you ask—app was blocked from campus Wi-Fi. In part, the above reasoning echoes earlier statements by Abbott.
“As outlined in the Governor’s directive, TikTok collects massive amounts of data from its users’ devices, including when, where and how they engage in online activity, and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government,” UT’s technology adviser wrote. Jeff Neiland.
The reaction on the dedicated UT Austin Reddit page was particularly unanimous: either students who hated the app and were glad it was gone, alumni who were glad it was gone, or secretive trolls who were glad it was gone.
So, on Thursday, January 19, I went down to the UT campus to talk to the students about what they really think about removing TikTok from their lives, at least while they are connected to UT WiFi.
“Honestly, I think it’s the right idea,” freshman Angela Gaona says with a hint of awe. Gaona was upset when the ban was first lifted but says she got over it quickly, mostly because it helped her realize how much time she spends glued to her phone.
She tells me that she is a dedicated TikTok scroller and that on most days, before the ban, she and her friends sent each other TikTok back and forth. Not so much anymore. I ask her how she fills time now.
“There are other applications,” Gaona laughs. “Or maybe just include homework.”
Her companion for the day, Julian Sanchez, agrees.
“It all comes down to why you came to this school and what you want to do. Why are you here?” He says. “It’s just better for everyone.”
However, Sanchez acknowledges one irony of the ban expressed recently through a meme he saw. Basically, due to being carried on campus, students can carry firearms on campus, but can’t connect to Wi-Fi and watch stupid videos.
Students were divided over the TikTok ban, with some ardent scrollers feeling relieved and non-users opposing the ban.
Chris O’Connell/MySASimilarly, Trevor Tankersley, a linguist and German specialist, sees some irony in the ban, calling it “a little frivolous.” I talk to him at the mall while he’s a table for the secular student alliance, an organization of which he is president.
A university employee who would have to remove it from university devices if he was a user of some social network – which he is not – Tankersley says he agrees with the ban in principle, and not just because he does not like TikTok and how people use it. He mentions the potential of spyware and that the Chinese government can request information from the app whenever it wants.
His friend and secular student alliance member Chris Coplin points out that US companies can solicit data from apps and that some of the ideas about the Chinese Communists plotting to get leaked data via TikTok are mostly hypothetical, presented as hard truth and propagated as propaganda. Overall, he is not a fan of the TikTok ban despite not using the app.
“It seems to be a goal in one when so many other apps on people’s phones will also leak data,” he says. They have a lively discussion of the ban and its implications before deciding that it won’t have much of an impact on student behavior. Off-campus students have their own Wi-Fi, and any on-campus student who uses TikTok as a way to generate income will be able to afford private Wi-Fi.
Additionally, Tankersley says, “If you want to use TikTok on campus, you can literally just turn on your data and it will still work just fine.”
Lucero Ponce, a journalism student who lives on campus, says she uses TikTok less now because of the ban.
“It kind of sucks. [having] switch to my data now,” says the sophomore.
Ponce says she foresaw this coming and so far it hasn’t affected her work as a journalist. It was just a stress reliever and a way to pass the time. But after the ban, its use was reduced from the usual aimless scrolling to almost nothing.
“Now I use it for five minutes,” she says. “Don’t know. Maybe that’s a good thing.”
