I was born in 2002, which means that by the time I reached my teenage years, socializing and friendships extended outside school grounds and onto social-media platforms. Facebook was, of course, out of the question as it was “too old” for us. The platforms we used instead were Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter.
We have since gained a more recent contender: TikTok.
It is no surprise that some are unwelcoming to this platform. After all, don’t all forms of social media pose a threat in the eyes of parents? Parents have been skeptical of social-media apps that seem to suck in attention every day (Full disclosure: I needed to put a time limit on my phone). However, the fear this time has escalated to not only questions about child safety but also, supposedly, national security.
On Jan. 27, 2023, I received a notice from my university that Gov. Tate Reeves banned TikTok from “all state-issued government devices and the state’s network.” While most state entities would not implement this ban until a new law took affect on July 1, 2023, several universities preemptively banned it, including my own school. This policy meant that neither I nor anyone else at the University of Mississippi could access TikTok on campus.
My initial reaction was, “What in the ‘1984’ is this?” It felt almost surreal that the government would ban an app, especially one that seemed like it was primarily for entertainment purposes. Was the government even allowed to ban apps?
Mississippi wasn’t the only state to ban TikTok on government devices and networks: Florida was the first to issue this ban, and other states such as Tennessee, Alabama, Utah and Maryland followed suit.
Gov. Reeves’s initial directive stated thus: “Mississippi isn’t going to sit around waiting for the Chinese Communist Party to steal our state government data, and that’s why I issued this directive. It will help us better protect our state’s sensitive information and critical infrastructure.”
The words that stuck out to me were “Chinese Communist Party.” I could understand the banning of an app because of some potential threat to
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