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UW's TikTok ban meets with mixed reactions

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Carrie Haderlie with the Laramie Boomerang, via the Wyoming News Exchange

LARAMIE — From his Laramie kitchen, Dylan Hollis makes retro recipes — think a pinto bean cake from 1955 — broadcasting the process, and the sometimes surprisingly delicious results, to his 9.7 million followers on TikTok.
 
But as of this week, Hollis’s videos, and the entire TikTok app, are banned from his alma mater, the University of Wyoming.
 
Monday morning, all staff at the University of Wyoming were told via email that they were to remove TikTok, a mobile-based video-sharing app that allows users to create and share short-form videos, “from any university-owned or issued technology equipment immediately.”
 
“TikTok is now blocked on all university networks,” the email from the UW’s Information Technology Department read. On Dec. 15, Gov. Mark Gordon issued a memorandum directing TikTok to be removed from all state-issued cell phones, tablets, computers and other technology equipment capable of internet connectivity.
 
“We are following the governor’s directive,” Chad Baldwin, associate vice president for the university’s institutional communications, said Monday.
The ban only applies to state-owned devices and state-operated and state-owned networks. It does not apply to personal devices or private cellular plans. 
 
TikTok, according to UW, had “come under scrutiny in recent months for its potential to share user data with the Chinese government.”
 
At least 21 other states have taken some form of official action against the app. TikTok was banned on all federal devices in December, following the inclusion of a “No TikTok on Government Devices Act,” sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in a government spending bill.
 
TikTok, with a Los Angeles, California, headquarters, is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet technology company based in Beijing. According to Jamal Brown with TikTok Communications, the platform created a “trust and safety team” in December within the United States to build further trust and confidence in the protection of user data and compliance.
 
“We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok,” Brown said in an email to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. “TikTok is loved by millions of Americans, and it is unfortunate that the many state agencies, offices, universities, student groups and sports teams in those states will no longer be able to use TikTok to build communities and share information.”
 
Rob Jenkins, a board member of both CyberWyoming and CyberWyoming Alliance, said that the biggest difference between TikTok and Facebook or Twitter, which also collect user data, “is that TikTok is based in China.” 
 
The relationship between TikTok and the Chinese government is not clear, he said.
 
“It is technically a privately held company, but China is a very authoritarian country,” Jenkins said. “The biggest difference between Facebook and TikTok is that one is based in China. TikTok, like any other social media platform, can be used to collect biometric or behavioral information on its users.”
 

 
Whether there is separation between TikTok and ByteDance is unclear, according to Jenkins. ByteDance employees in China and the U.S. “inappropriately pulled the data, including the IP addresses — which reveal a person’s general location — of journalists from BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times,” according to reports from Politico.
 
“Whether it is Chinese-based or a U.S.-based subsidiary, it is based in China. All of the code and everything else that TikTok is using originates in China,” Jenkins said.
 
But TikTok, according to Brown, has addressed all “areas of alarm,” and is working toward storing data only on servers located in the United States. The company is also considering “submission of its recommendation algorithms to monitoring, and placing its operations under the control of a board of security experts reporting to the U.S. government.”
 
Other social media apps do collect similar amount of data on their users, Jenkins said. And from a technological standpoint, apps like TikTok, Facebook and YouTube are very similar. They all employ “incredibly sophisticated machine learning algorithms” that tee up similar content for the user, keeping people in a feedback loop of reinforcing beliefs.
 
“It basically is making (the app) more appealing to you as a user,” Jenkins said. “If you’re looking at a certain Facebook feed, it is going to show you more like that. The concern with TikTok, which might have a government affiliation, is that you can use that artificial intelligence to shape what an individual is seeing and reading.”
 
Hollis, an international student who graduated in 2021 with a bachelor of arts in music, is a Bermudian. He lived in Laramie from 2014-2021, and still spends time in the community. He said the TikTok ban hampers free and open communication, and seems “commendably un-American.” 
 
As a former international student himself, Hollis said he worries about how Chinese students at UW could be negatively affected by the ban and the perceptions it creates.
 
“At best, this ban might see an increase in productivity,” Hollis said. “At worst, it will serve to fuel a growing anti-Chinese sentiment across the populace and the greater nation in what is seemingly becoming a new Red Scare.”
 
While he has enjoyed a rare level of success on the platform, Hollis said he doesn’t spend hours scrolling through TikTok. He’s aware that each time he opens the app, it collects his user data.
 
“It is true that, as users of these applications, we are giving over so much data, from location to our searches. They keep the videos we upload and the photos, where we are signing into the app and how often,” he said. “But to pin TikTok as a bully, as a menace, you must understand that the same information is being collected by Facebook, Snapchat, Amazon, Instagram, Google, everything. The only difference, when you look at this, is that Meta is United States based. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is, in fact, Chinese, and there is this fear.”
 
Hollis visited TikTok’s headquarters in Los Angeles last summer, and said the employees were kind and enthusiastic about his journey as an entertainer.
 
“Despite my prying, I found no covert intelligence posts, secret passageways, armed guards or suspicious underground tunnels funneling intel back to China,” he said. “Now, is there a chance that I am a mere brainwashed pawn of the CCP? Yes. Just as there’s the chance that I might be a sentient ham sandwich living in a very realistic simulation.”
 
Hollis said he mainly uses the app to communicate with like-minded community members, and that one of his favorite TikTok accounts was UW’s Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts’ TikTok. It featured videos of student projects, current events and upcoming performances.
 
“It was another way for students to feel a closer connection to their community and to the university,” Hollis said. “TikTok’s ability to create a sense of community is, to me, its biggest benefit. It figuratively saved me from the deep, dark, lonesome depths of COVID-19’s height back in 2020.”
 
Katherine Iris Kirkaldie, the Fine Arts Coordinator with the UW Department of Theatre and Dance and Music, said in an email to the WTE that the TikTok accounts “we have over in the arts at UW have always been run by staff and student employees on personal devices because, well, that is just how TikTok operates.”
 
“We are inquiring whether the ban on using this platform on state- and university-owned devices prohibits use on personal devices if we are representing a UW unit,” she said Tuesday.
 
When it comes to the claim that social media increases community, Joe Russo, an adjunct professor at the university who is listed on the university’s expert list under “Social Media and Its Impact on Mental Health,” said he disagrees. 
 
Historically, people were lucky to have two or three good friends in a lifetime, not thousands.
 
“Facebook, among all of the (social media) platforms, has degraded the definition of ‘friend,’” he said. “Facebook is probably the most depressive of all of the platforms, because people tend to post, well, lies.
 
“They are not inherently truthful,” he said, adding that the American-owned platform becomes a comparison trap for many users.
 
However, short-format videos on TikTok pose their own challenges, reducing complicated life scenarios to seconds-long clips, he said.
 
Russo does support the ban, but said he doesn’t want the university or state government to get “too carried away.” Instead, he wishes people would simply delete social media apps on their own.
 
“Whenever I have this discussion in my classes — and I teach both undergraduate and graduate classes — I would say the vast majority of the kids get it,” Russo said. “Too much screen time is a bad thing. But they want to have their better natures appealed to. They don’t want to be told what to do.”
 
Jenkins said that having an app on your phone is different than opening and using that app, but added that a ban would certainly decrease the time spent on the app.
 
“There are always smart people out there that will work around bans,” he said. “But a ban would significantly decrease the amount of people with access to the application. And it is up to the politicians and others to decide how destructive and damaging TikTok is.”
 
In the meantime, Hollis said he believes there are far better ways to deal with potential cybersecurity threats than a “heavy-handed ban” that is “essentially an illusion.”
 
“On the upside, this will surely make for good memes and TikToks from students who will certainly continue to use the app,” Hollis said.
 
This story was published on Jan. 26, 2023.

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