On April 6th, this past Thursday, UCF joined other Florida public Universities in banning the app TikTok on its networks and removing the application from all school devices. 

An email was sent to UCF students and staff on April 6th which included the following: 

“Experts and research have recently pointed to the possibility that foreign governments may use certain social media apps, websites and platforms to collect user data and personal identifiers; exert influence over the recommendation algorithm; and compromise devices. Due to these security concerns, the Florida Board of Governors issued an emergency regulation that requires all of Florida’s public universities to comply with the State University System’s Prohibited Technologies List. To comply with the regulation, UCF will block access to the listed social media apps, websites and platforms deemed to threaten privacy and data security.”

“The following platforms will no longer be accessible via UCF’s networks and must be deleted from any university-owned devices, including computers tablets and phones: Kaspersky, VKontakte, Tencent QQ, TikTok, WeChat, Any subsidiary or affiliate of an entity listed above”
According to data insight aggregating organization, demandsage.com, TikTok has over 1 billion active users across over 150 countries and is the 6th most popular social media platform in the world. Curiously, UCF still has an official TikTok page actively posting as recently as this semester but which can not be accessed currently on a school owned laptop. Jesse Meek, a senior health sciences major at UCF spoke with the Nicholson Student Media’s Today, and didn’t see a valuable reason in this change. “Social media in general is highly invasive and tends to be a method for others to have insight on your life,” Meek said. “TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram all know our information at the end of the day. It’s also not super inconvenient because I can just use my phone data on campus to use TikTok now.” According to a BBC article written earlier this year, the threats TikTok poses are all theoretical and with differing degrees of validity. Some charge that TikTok harvests an excessive amount of data although conflicting reports suggest that the data collection is about synonymous with other apps. Other charges include the use of TikTok as a brainwashing tool which and perhaps primarily TikTok’s potential use by the Chinese government to spy on Americans, both claims have been disputed by evidence including some from the Georgia Institute of Technology. UCF notes that the platforms on the Prohibited Technologies List may change, and UCF will update practices to remain in compliance.