Hosts of KSL at Night discuss if free speech should be permitted on college campuses after Mike Lee spoke against student protesters. (Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News)
SALT LAKE CITY — Some Universities across the country have banned TikTok on campus following executive orders banning the app on all government devices. Despite this, TikTok likely won’t be going anywhere in Utah’s higher education system. Gov. Cox exempted universities from his executive order.
Associate Director of Communication at the University of Utah, Rebecca Walsh tells KSL NewsRadio that, due to universities being exempt the university will continue to use TikTok.
“We will continue to use TikTok on our campus to engage our alumni [and] to communicate with students and anyone else that is tuning in to our TikTok,” she says. “We are going to take our guidance from state leaders on this.”
Along with this, Walsh says the U has no plans to ban TikTok on campus unless instructed by state leaders.
The U is active on TikTok. However, Walsh says it doesn’t have an active campaign to expand.
“I think there is an academic enterprise working on this … there’s also security implications, there’s international-political implications,” she says. “I know that academia broadly is studying TikTok, so I think we’ll wait and see what some of that research finds.
The university uses TikTok as a way to better communicate with its students, according to Walsh.
“TikTok is, sort of, an emerging tool for universities to use to communicate with students. We know our students are … fully emersed in TikTok,” she says. “It’s another platform that we can use. A fun platform, in a lot of cases, for communicating things about athletics, things about activities and campus life. Those kinds of things.”
The U’s TikTok page has 11 thousand followers and a few hundred thousand likes.