First Amendment group sues Texas Governor and others over the state's TikTok ban on official devices
apnews.com
A First Amendment group sued Texas Governor Greg Abbott and others on Thursday over the state’s TikTok ban on official devices, arguing the prohibition – which extends to public universities – is unconstitutional and impedes academic freedom.
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Y'all should read the article. The issue is that a professor who studies digital media can't search TikTok, and can't have her grad students search videos on TikTok. This ends her research because TikTok is where people post videos.
Hmmm allow spyware on government owned devices, or let some grad student do his thesis on TikTok. Decisions decisions.
For real, this is one of the very few things right-wingers are correct about. Of course they're correct because they're hawkish on China rather than because it's bad to let authoritarian countries have literal spyware on the devices of your citizens, but something something broken clocks. That being said, I think a carve out for universities studying media would make sense at least, but hopefully the whole thing doesn't get overturned.
Yeah it’s very confusing to agree with them because they are right for the wrong reasons.
TikTok is a security nightmare - I work in IT so I know a little about this. But the idea that a work owned device has restrictions about what can be installed is nothing new. Now I do work in IT but also in academia, so you know how you get around this? Grant money. Go buy whatever device you want and it’s not university/state government owned.
This looks like a cherry picked problem to make a stink about something not important. Texas has much bigger issues that need dealt with.
But with that being said fuck TikTok.
Scientist here. Unfortunately who owns the device really depends on the funding source. If the money is coming from one of the bigger funders (NSF, NIH etc) the devices are usually still owned by the university and their rules apply.
The TikTok problem is real. She needs to access the content that's being produced to do her research. If she has to go to other or secondary sources (TikToks uploaded to YouTube or whatever) that will impact the quality of her research, which may make it less reliable.
I'm currently struggling with a similar but less severe issue. My university has, in their limited wisdom, decided to stop allowing us to purchase gaming computers. I do games research, so that's obviously a bit of a problem.
Gaming computers? Really? I work for our distance education dept (well it’s called digital education now since pretty much everything has on online component) and we have a group doing lots of 3D media creation (3D scanning, virtual environments,etc). Guess what that requires? High end gaming machines. It seems a little short sighted by your university. Luckily we don’t have bean counters scrutinizing every purchase like that. Man would that get annoying.
I guess I’m starting to realize how good we have it hearing about all these weird restrictions being placed on purchases.
The powers that be seem to be under the impression that workstation class computers are suitable replacements, while failing to realize that those are several times more expensive for the same performance and also mired in a whole mess of driver issues.
It's basically a clusterfuck. I know the dean and his staff are working to solve the problem, but we'll see how that turns out. Hopefully the magical words "impacts student success" and "inability to acquire grants" will work.
Should create a process allowing them to set up a test environment as a digital equivalent of a biological weapons research lab (just not as leaky as that one in Wuhan) and play with the CCP spyware from there.
I think the lawsuit is absurd, but the University professor in question did apply for an exemption for herself and her students in the classroom, and she was denied without review because the ban is absolute.
Fwiw I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to simply use personal devices for such research. But the argument that the ban goes too far doesn't seem completely unreasonable in this narrow use case.
I'd like to see TikTok banned from all devices across the US (personal or otherwise) but I don't make the rules. It's among the worst of a bad bunch of applications and under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. To me, that sets it apart from the ones owned by US-based companies because at least those companies can get dragged into court for doing something wrong or grossly negligent. It's not as easy to go after a Chinese company, particularly if (/when) the instruction to collect data comes from their government.
My other concerns are too tin-foil-hat to bring up here which should say something given what I wrote above. Short version is that none of them can be trusted but that goes double (at least) for anything connected to the CCP.
Oh jeez, people are still doing lab leak conspiracy theories? Maybe someday we'll have evidence of that and the years of conspiracies will finally pay off.
It's not something I'd stake my life on but if I were to place it in a range from "aliens visit Earth to butt-probe rednecks" to "OJ murdered Ron and Nicole", it'd be much closer to the OJ end. More information is needed.