A group of college professors is suing Texas for banning TikTok on public-university computers and phones, saying it has undermined their ability to teach students and research one of the world’s most popular apps.
Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which filed the suit on the coalition’s behalf, said the ban is not a “sensible or constitutional response” to critics’ worries that the app could be used for propaganda or espionage.
The coalition and the institute have received no money or support from TikTok, its owner ByteDance or any other tech firms, Jaffer said.An associate professor at the University of North Texas who was cited in the suit, Jacqueline Vickery, said she was forced to suspend research projects and abandon in-class discussions and exercises when the ban took effect after winter break.
But while some of her students have told her they use TikTok more than Google, Vickery can no longer, as she did in past semesters, ask her class to look at TikTok’s privacy policy, scrutinize its data collection or analyze how its algorithm works.
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