When waiting for their next class or at lunch, students and staff at several of Texas’ largest colleges won’t be allowed to use the university WiFi to scroll TikTok.
According to local news sites, Texas A&M University is preventing TikTok from operating on its IT network due to a decision from Governor Greg Abbott. Texas A&M University is estimated to be the state’s largest university, with nearly 70,000 students.
A similar notification was made on Tuesday by the University of Texas at Austin, which has about 52,000 students. It stated that students could not access the video-sharing app while they were linked to the university’s wired or WiFi networks.
Both institutions claimed to have begun deleting the software from all government-issued gadgets, including mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and desktop PCs. According to the local news source The Eagle, A&M instructed workers in December to deactivate the app, stop posting, and remove all references to TikTok from university websites.
Abbot banned TikTok
On December 6, Abbott issued an order directing state agencies to forbid their employees from downloading or utilizing TikTok on any equipment provided by the government, citing cybersecurity concerns.
“TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices … and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government,” Abbott said in the directive. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China.
In December, FBI Director Chris Wray expressed concerns about TikTok’s potential impact on national security and forewarned that China would exploit the program to gather user information for espionage purposes.
Representatives of the University of Texas informed Insider at Dallas, University of Texas at Arlington, University of Houston Downtown, Texas State University, Lamar University, and University of Texas at San Antonio that TikTok had been prohibited on campus wired and wireless networks as well as on university-issued devices. The University of North Texas website claims to have followed suit.
US states are avoiding the app
In response to Abbott’s directive, the University of Houston “immediately” stopped all activity on all university-managed TikTok accounts, a university representative told Insider. However, the university kept its wired or wireless services the same. The institution examined more than 20,000 university-owned devices, and six of them had the app deleted, the official continued.
The biography of A&M’s Physics and Astronomy Department’s 1.5 million-follower TikTok account reads, “We no longer post to TikTok.” Instead, it pointed users to its YouTube channel. The department regularly published on TikTok, and several videos had millions of views. The day before Abbott’s order was issued, it had its most recent posting.
Meanwhile, Texas State and Lamar University employees were instructed to make university-affiliated accounts private and erase any institutional branding, including logos and contact information, rather than deleting them. Students were informed by Lamar University and the University of Texas at Dallas that TikTok would still function in their residence halls.
The Lone Star State is not the only one. More than half of the states in the US have prohibited TikTok on devices that are provided by the government, including recent actions by the governors of Alabama (Kay Ivey), New Jersey (Phil Murphy), and Ohio (Mike DeWine). Additionally, TikTok has been blocked from the WiFi at colleges in several states.
