SOON after Texas university students returned to classes last month, they received a note from the IT department, informing them of a new rule: they could no longer access TikTok, the popular video app, on university WiFi.
They had mixed feelings.
"There are legitimate security concerns with the app," said Adam Nguyen, a 19-year-old computer science major at the University of Texas at Austin.
"But people should be able to make their own decisions — this sets a dangerous precedent with the university deciding what sorts of things you can do on the network," he said.
The move comes as part of a swirl of efforts to limit the use of TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, in the United States, over fears that US user data could be passed on to China's government.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to hold a vote this month on a bill aimed at blocking the use of TikTok in the US.
"There are real concerns about data gathering by Chinese companies," said Aynne Kokas, a professor of the University of Virginia, and author of the book Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty. "But the idea that this problem goes away if you ban TikTok, that's just not true."
For three years, TikTok, which has more than 100 million US users, has been seeking to assure Washington that the personal data of US citizens cannot be accessed and its content cannot be manipulated by China's Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing's influence.
TikTok has said bans are based on "unfounded falsehoods about TikTok". It's the most downloaded app in the US since 2021, according to Sensor Tower, a data analytics company.
In December last year, US President Joe Biden signed a law banning TikTok from government devices and more than half of US states have passed similar restrictions, with college campuses and even some elementary schools following suit.
Sarah Kreps, director at the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, said the ban should be seen within the context of a more-than-decades long effort by the US to limit the spread of Chinese technology.
"It's part of this larger government effort to slow down Chinese progress and impede their ability to engage in surveillance of Americans," she said, pointing to restrictions on imports of hardware by China's tech giant, Huawei, and telecoms equipment maker, ZTE, going back over a decade.
US courts blocked a move by the Trump administration in 2020 to ban the Chinese messaging app, WeChat, from Apple and Google's app stores, citing free speech concerns.
Kreps said the concerns over surveillance were credible, pointing to a report from Forbes magazine in December that found ByteDance had used the TikTok app to track multiple journalists to discover the source of leaks.
Kreps said she understood the need to limit TikTok's access to government devices, but efforts against the app were likely motivated by political and commercial concerns aimed at slowing TikTok's spread rather than banning it outright.
"Right now, we are looking at a patchwork approach — it's not very effective," she said. "It feels like death by a thousand cuts."
Students can easily bypass the bans by using their own data, and government workers are still able to access TikTok from personal devices.
Rep Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat pushing to ban TikTok from operating in the US, pointed to Huawei, which has faced bans on its products from the US and other countries, as an example of a global response to security concerns.
"When you have... 140 million Americans' user data and algorithms ultimately, potentially controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, that's a problem."
The legislation Krishnamoorthi and Wisconsin's Republican Rep Mike Gallagher introduced in the House does single out TikTok and Bytedance. But it also leaves room for restrictions on social media companies housed in countries of "concern" that include China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.
The bans have ignited a broader debate over Internet sovereignty and the trade-offs countries face for seeking to counter China's influence in the technology space.
The writers are from the Reuters news agency