In March, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to ban the wildly popular app TikTok if its owner, China-based company ByteDance, did not sell its stake in the company. The move forced colleges to weigh the benefits and potential consequences if the app were removed from campus WiFi.
Nearly half (47%) of undergraduate students use TikTok daily, according to a recent survey from Intelligent, a college resource website. Of those who regularly use the app, 75% said they use it to help with school work, and 30% said their grades would worsen if it were banned. Aside from a poorer GPA, 45% believed their mental health would worsen.
At the same time, colleges and universities would miss out on a cutting-edge marketing tactic to engage current students and high school seniors assessing whether to apply. Ohio University, lauded for its social media engagement strategy, has recently employed student-friendly content to spur interest and brand loyalty. Bowling Green State University has also used the app to champion its work and gain outreach on exciting new dining amenities, Sprout Social reports.
“Several unintended consequences could arise from TikTok bans, including an exacerbating effect on the current enrollment crisis as bans would prohibit institutions from using TikTok to connect with an enormous base of current and prospective students,” said Rob Buelow, head of Product and Impact divisions of Education at Vector Solutions.
However, institutions must also be on the lookout so as to not compromise their personal data and digital footprint. Chinese national security laws compelling organizations to assist with intelligence gathering could force ByteDance to overturn its data, which includes intimate and detailed user posts from students and even early-stage campus research discoveries, says Michael Nizich, director of the Entrepreneurship & Technology Innovation Center at the New York Institute of Technology.
“Because the company is a Chinese-owned company, the long-time, flagrant and deliberate theft of intellectual property by China in recent years puts the onus of securing those servers on China,” he says. “It leaves a big question mark as to why China would properly secure TikTok servers and data while it has every intention of using it for its own purposes.”
On a higher education scale, colleges and universities could potentially experience intellectual property theft. But on a national security scale, TikTok user data, which comprises approximately 148 million Americans, can be used to create targeted misinformation campaigns.
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