Over the winter holidays, 16 US states—together with Georgia and Texas—banned the favored short-form video app TikTok in work contexts, particularly on any system one has been supplied by their employer. Governors from Texas to New Hampshire issued total prohibitions on the app on “state IT infrastructure.” In South Dakota and Georgia, governing bodies of higher education ordered compliance with their governors’ orders on all faculty and college gadgets. Other states have gone as far as to ban TikTok use when connected to campus Wi-Fi.

Concerns about TikTok harken again to the app’s guardian firm, the Chinese-owned ByteDance. The concern is that the Chinese authorities will compel ByteDance at hand over US TikTok information or drive them to control the already highly-tailored algorithm to push divisive content material. Accordingly, former President Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to ban the app in 2020 by way of potential executive order and divestment requirements. And in December, FBI director Chris Wray gave testimony to the US House and Homeland Security Committee, arguing that the app poses a nationwide safety menace. 

Yet the panic about TikTok is overblown. While some data concerns exist—although none more extreme than these over any US-based social media platforms—insurance policies and discourse round TikTok in politics quantity to a modern-day Red Scare. American politicians appear eager to level fingers at China for an absence of information safety with out holding a mirror as much as themselves, as they hold permitting Big Tech lobbyists to quash any significant makes an attempt at federal social media regulation. Without a federal ban on TikTok all through the United States (which remains staunchly unlikely), it’s unattainable to place the app again within the proverbial Pandora’s field. And in terms of educating good media residents in faculty school rooms, these TikTok bans will do extra hurt than good.

Social media analysis and instructing have develop into staples in academia and better schooling curriculums. The app has basically modified the character of contemporary communication with its aesthetics, practices, storytelling, and information-sharing.

From an academic standpoint, how are media and communications professors supposed to coach college students to be savvy content material creators and shoppers if we are able to’t educate a pillar of the fashionable media panorama? While college students can definitely nonetheless entry TikTok throughout the privateness of their very own properties, professors can not put TikToks into PowerPoint slides or present TikTok hyperlinks by way of classroom net browser. Brands, corporations, and novel types of storytelling all depend on TikTok, and professors will not be capable to prepare their college students in finest practices for these functions. Additionally, TikTok makes elements of the world extra accessible, as college students can see the issues they’re studying about in actual time.

The world retains turning as these states implement their bans, leaving their residents deprived in a fast-paced media world. Additionally, media and communications college students within the states shall be at a drawback in making use of for jobs, showcasing communicative and technical mastery, and model and storytelling expertise, as their friends from different states will be capable to obtain schooling and coaching.

Professors additionally should do analysis. Social media students in these states fairly actually can’t do what they’ve been employed to do and be specialists in if these bans persist. While college compliance workplaces have mentioned the bans might solely be on campus Wi-Fi and cellular information continues to be allowed, who will foot that invoice for one to pay for a costlier information plan on their cellphone? The reply is nobody. While working at dwelling does stay an choice, professors are additionally workers who’re anticipated to be on campus frequently to point out they’re in reality working. This means any social media professor making an attempt to analysis TikTok on campus should depend on video streaming by way of cellular information, which can be quite expensive, both by means of having to individually pay for limitless information, or by accident going over one’s limits.