Students and faculty at Auburn University can no longer access the social media application TikTok on school wifi, and employees are warned not to install the app on school devices. File Photo by Alex Plavevski/EPA-EFE
Dec. 21 (UPI) — Students and faculty at Auburn University can no longer access the social media application TikTok on school WiFi, and employees are told not to install the app on school devices.
The crackdown on the popular video app comes almost a week after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced a ban of TikTok on all government-owned devices. Auburn’s office of information technology said it is “monitoring developments related to accessing TikTok,” on Friday and will post updates when new information is received. No updates have been posted since.
The Auburn Tigers official TikTok account last posted a video on Dec. 2, featuring its volleyball team beating Creighton in the first round of the NCAA Volleyball Tournament. The football team’s account posted a video introducing its new head coach Hugh Freeze on Dec. 3. The men’s basketball team also posted on Dec. 3, showing footage of its game against Colgate.
Auburn is a public university. According to its office of institutional research, Auburn’s 2016-17 revenue was more than $1.19 billion and about $231.6 million came from the state.
“Efforts are underway to remove TikTok from all state-owned devices provided by Auburn,” a school memo to students obtained by Insider said.
“Note also that the new policy recommends removing TikTok from personal devices to protect a person’s privacy there as well. The governor’s order addresses the growing risk of intrusive social media applications harvesting data totally unrelated to business use of the platform.”
Alabama is one of several states to restrict the use of TikTok on government-owned or issued devices. South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Texas, Idaho, Maryland and South Carolina have all announced restrictions in recent weeks.
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a bill introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., which would ban TikTok on all government devices. The bill is yet to be decided on by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced a piece of legislation that aims to ban all social media platforms with ties to the Chinese, Russian or other governments “of concern.”
“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok,” Rubio said in a statement. “This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day.”
