Texas Professors Take Legal Action Against State’s TikTok Ban
According to The Washington Post, a lawsuit has been filed by a collective of university professors against Texas for its decision to prohibit the use of TikTok on state devices and networks. The professors argue that this ban hampers their ability to conduct research and teach effectively, as it restricts their exploration of TikTok’s disinformation and data-collection methods, which the ban purportedly aims to address. Additionally, the plaintiffs claim that the prohibition severely limits their capacity to incorporate TikTok into their classrooms, whether for educational purposes or to utilize TikTok content to teach other subjects.
Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute filed the suit on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, an academic research advocacy group whose members include Texas professors. The lawsuit names Gov. Greg Abbott and 14 other state and public education officials as defendants. “The government’s authority to monitor their research and teaching … cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny,” the complaint says.
One example cited by the plaintiffs is Jacqueline Vickery, an assistant professor in the media arts department at the University of North Texas who studies and teaches how young people use social media for expression and political organizing. “The ban has forced him to suspend research projects and change his research program, change his teaching methodology and remove course materials,” the complaint reads. “It has also impaired his ability to answer students’ questions and evaluate the work of other researchers, including as part of the peer review process.”
The suit says that while public university faculty are public employees, the First Amendment protects them from government surveillance of their research and teaching. “A broad restriction on research and teaching by public university faculty is not a constitutionally permissible means of protecting the ‘way of life’ of Texans or countering the threat of disinformation,” the suit says, referring to Abbott’s comments that he feared the Chinese government. “is using TikTok to attack our way of life.” The lawsuit also decries the double standard of claiming to care about the privacy of Texans while still allowing Meta, Google and Twitter (all American companies) to collect much of the same data as TikTok.
“The ban stifles research on the very concerns Governor Abbott raised, disinformation and data collection,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Change Institute, told The Washington Post. “There are other ways to address those concerns that don’t place the same serious burden on faculty and researchers’ First Amendment rights,” he added, as well as their “ability to continue studying what has become, whether we like it or not, a very popular and influential communication platform.”
This is the third lawsuit this year challenging state TikTok bans. Two Montana lawsuits funded by a Chinese social media company claim the ban violates free speech. According to The New York Times, TikTok is not involved in the Texas suit.
