Maricopa County Colleges to ban Tik Tok for employees
The Maricopa County Community College District will ban Tik Tok for all employees starting June 27, 2023, according to an announcement Monday citing statewide concern over the Chinese owned social media app and video sharing platform.
The ban will affect all 10 MCCCD college’s official business on Tik Tok, such as marketing, public relations and club accounts, but does not impact student or personal use on devices that are not on MCCCD’s networks.
The district will actively scan and remove the application from MCCCD owned devices, along with banning the app’s IP addresses and domains.
The decision comes after Arizona governor Katie Hobbs issued an April executive order that banned the app for all state and government employees.
MCCCD said Tik Tok parent company, ByteDance, is “known to harvest user data and is reportedly able to access a user’s personal information,” read an announcement by MCCCD general counsel Janice Falkenberg.
The announcement further cited fears over “[Tik Toks] ability to exclude content in the form of censorship, thereby distorting users’ perceptions.”
MCCCD joined Arizona State University, University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University in banning Tik Tok for employees.
MCCCD will allow exceptions on a case by case basis, focusing on use for a class such as social media studies, and will still need to be approved by the district or college chief information officer.
While Arizona still remains a state where college students can use the app for personal use with no government regulation, Montana made history on May 17 by becoming the first state in the nation to completely ban Tik Tok, starting in 2024.
Morgan Watson, alumni of Mesa Community College class of 2023, felt the privacy concerns related to Tik Tok were too small of an impact in the scale of social media offerings.
“I think that when it comes to using Tik Tok or any social media app, you can’t be too worried about privacy concerns,” Watson said.
Watson believed Tik Tok has a bigger issue with a lack of content filters to manage inappropriate content on the platform.
