Texas will ban TikTok use on state-owned devices or networks after all.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University challenged the state’s proposed ban in a lawsuit filed in July, insisting it “is preventing or seriously impeding faculty from pursuing research that relates to TikTok.”
However, on Dec. 11, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman said the government’s data concerns make it a “reasonable restriction.”
“Public university faculty — and all public employees — are free to use TikTok on their personal devices as long as such devices are not used to access state networks,” he wrote.
The decision comes after Montana filed a similar lawsuit against TikTok use, but the ban was blocked due to it concerning all devices.
“Without TikTok, users are deprived of communicating by their preferred means of speech,” U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy stated.
The U.K. government announced it was banning TikTok amid security concerns.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak disallowed the video-sharing app from being downloaded onto government-owned devices like phones following fears about how their parent company, ByteDance — which is based in China — handles their data.
Oliver Downde, the Cabinet Office Minister, told members of parliament that the decision was being made after an extensive review found that there could “be a risk around how sensitive Government data is accessed and used by certain platforms.”
The U.S. federal government and the European Commission did the same.
