“This is a disappointing decision,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director, who argued for a preliminary injunction before Judge Pitman last month. “Restricting research and teaching about one of the world’s major communications platforms is not a sensible or constitutionally permissible way of addressing legitimate concerns about TikTok’s data-collection practices.”

Texas’s TikTok ban requires all state agencies, including public universities, to bar employees from downloading or using TikTok on state devices and networks, as well as on personal devices used to conduct state business. According to the Knight Institute and the Coalition, the ban is already having far-reaching effects on public university faculty—requiring faculty to suspend research projects, alter their research agendas, change their teaching methodologies, eliminate course materials, and limit their engagement with research produced by other scholars. The Coalition includes professors at public universities in Texas whose research and teaching have been compromised by the ban.

“Given TikTok’s popularity and influence on culture and politics worldwide, it’s important that researchers be able to study the platform, particularly ahead of one of the most significant global election years in recent history,” said Brandi Geurkink, a board member of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research. “This ban puts a blindfold on researchers that prevents them from studying the very risks that Texas says it wants to address.”

In connection with the lawsuit, Bruce Schneier, one of the country’s most prominent cybersecurity experts, filed two declarations explaining that Texas’s TikTok ban is ineffective, unnecessary, and even counterproductive.  Read those here and here. The court did not engage with the declarations in its ruling.

“Texas is restricting First Amendment rights for no good reason,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute. “Banning TikTok doesn’t actually address privacy concerns because other platforms are collecting the same data, and because the same kind of data collected by TikTok can easily be purchased from data brokers. The court should have required Texas to justify the ban. It’s disappointing it didn’t.”

Read the decision here.

Read more about the case here.

Lawyers on the case include Jameel Jaffer, Ramya Krishnan, and Xiangnong (George) Wang for the Knight Institute and Peter Steffensen of the First Amendment Clinic at SMU Dedman School of Law.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, adriana.lamirande@knightcolumbia.org. 

“Texas’s TikTok ban is both overbroad and ineffective, and it imposes a heavy burden on the First Amendment rights of faculty who study TikTok and use TikTok in their teaching, as we make clear in the papers filed today,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “Suppressing research and teaching about one of the world’s major communications platforms is not a sensible or constitutionally permissible way of addressing the data-collection and disinformation concerns that Texas has identified.”

Texas’s TikTok ban requires all state agencies, including public universities, to bar employees from downloading or using TikTok on state devices and networks, as well as on personal devices used to conduct state business. In the papers filed today, the Knight Institute and the Coalition write that the ban is already having far-reaching effects on public university faculty—“requiring faculty to suspend research projects, alter their research agendas, change their teaching methodologies, eliminate course materials, and limit their engagement with research produced by other scholars.” The Coalition includes professors at public universities in Texas whose research and teaching have been compromised by the ban.

To support today’s motion, the Coalition and Knight Institute submitted a declaration from Bruce Schneier, one of the nation’s foremost experts on computer security and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In explaining why Texas’s ban won’t protect Texans’ privacy, Schneier’s declaration explains that any company—or foreign government—that wants to acquire data about Americans can readily purchase that data from data brokers. To support that point, Schneier cites, among other things, a recent report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 

The groups also submitted a declaration from Professor Jacqueline Vickery, a member of the Coalition and a professor at the University of North Texas whose work focuses on how young people use digital and social media for informal learning, self-expression, and activism. “The ban has forced me to abandon or suspend research projects and change both the content of my courses and the way I teach them,” said Vickery. “It has also limited my ability to participate in the process of peer-review. It’s had a profound effect on nearly every aspect of my work.”

In asking for the injunction, the Coalition and the Knight Institute note that the state’s legitimate interests in guarding against disinformation and protecting Texans’ privacy can be accommodated without restraining academic research and expression. Possible measures include expanding a Texas data privacy law that passed in June, and promoting more visibility into platforms’ operations by requiring social media companies to provide more data to researchers and the public.

“With today’s filing, we’re asking the court to exempt public university faculty from the ban while it considers our challenge to the ban’s constitutionality,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute. “Given the ban’s far-reaching implications for academic expression, we hope the court will move quickly.”

Read today’s brief here. 

Read the declarations from:
Bruce Schneier, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University;
Jacqueline Vickery, Coalition for Independent Technology Research and University of North Texas;
Ethan Zuckerman, Coalition for Independent Technology Research and University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and
Ioana Literat, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Lawyers on the case include Jameel Jaffer, Ramya Krishnan, and George Wang for the Knight Institute and Peter Steffensen of the First Amendment Clinic at SMU Dedman School of Law.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, adriana.lamirande@knightcolumbia.org. 

“Banning public university faculty from studying and teaching with TikTok is not a sensible or constitutional response to concerns about data-collection and disinformation,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. “Texas must pursue its objectives with tools that don’t impose such a heavy burden on First Amendment rights. Privacy legislation would be a good place to start.”

The Coalition for Independent Technology Research is a group of academics, journalists, civil society researchers, and community scientists that works to advance, defend, and sustain the right to study the impact of technology on society. The coalition’s members include professors at public universities in Texas whose research and teaching have been compromised by the ban.  

“Like it or not, TikTok is an immensely popular communications platform, and its policies and practices are influencing culture and politics around the world,” said Dave Karpf, a Coalition for Independent Technology Research board member and associate professor in the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. “It’s important that scholars and researchers be able to study the platform and illuminate the risks associated with it. Ironically, Texas’s misguided ban is impeding our members from studying the very risks that Texas says it wants to address.”

Texas is not the only state to have enacted a TikTok ban of one kind or another. At least 35 states have banned TikTok on  state devices and networks. State university systems or universities in 20 states have banned TikTok on university devices, university networks, or both. Montana passed a ban in May 2023; two lawsuits have been filed challenging that law, one by TikTok and another by TikTok users.

The case filed today is notable in part because it concerns academic freedom, which Texas and a number of other states have been endeavoring to curtail in a variety of ways. For example, Texas has passed laws limiting tenure and banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities, and is now considering a bill that would ban the teaching of critical race theory on public college campuses. The question of what protections the First Amendment affords to public university faculty is one the Supreme Court has not fully resolved.

“Texas’s TikTok ban is an assault on academic freedom, which is the lifeblood of every university and a central concern of the First Amendment,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “The court should make clear that Texas can’t shut down an important avenue of teaching and research at its public universities when there are far less intrusive measures that would secure its aims.”

Read today’s complaint here.

In addition to Jaffer and Krishnan, lawyers on the case include Stacy Livingston of the Knight Institute and Peter Steffensen of the First Amendment Clinic at SMU Dedman School of Law.

For more information, contact: Lorraine Kenny, lorraine.kenny@knightcolumbia.org. 

Krishnan called the Texas decision “disappointing and surprising,” noting that the ban is “counterproductive because, essentially, the state is hamstringing researchers from studying the very risks it says it cares about.”

In a declaration filed in support of the Knight Institute’s request for preliminary relief in that case, Bruce Schneier—one of the nation’s leading experts on privacy and computer security—addressed the other side of the equation, Texas’s possible interests in enacting the ban. He concluded that the ban is ineffective, unnecessary, and even counterproductive. Although it centers on the circumstances in Texas, Schneier’s declaration should be read widely. It has obvious relevance to the ongoing public discussion over banning TikTok—not just in Texas but around the country, including in the litigation unfolding in Montana over that state’s broad public ban; the legislative deliberations in states like Massachusetts, Illinois, and California that are considering their own bans; and the very live debate about a possible ban at the federal level.

In his declaration, Schneier evaluated Texas’s purported justifications for the ban, which he sees as general concerns about data collection, the spread of disinformation, and network security, as well as specific concerns relating to TikTok’s connections to China. But if these are Texas’s reasons for the ban, Schneier explained, they are poor ones; a ban is entirely ineffective in addressing any of these interests. He observed that while data collection, disinformation, and network security may be “serious concerns,” they are issues that “are not unique to TikTok” but “present on all popular online platforms”—including American ones.

Texas’s Ban Won’t Effectively Address Concerns about Data Collection

With respect to social media platforms’ data collection practices, Schneier acknowledged that governments “are right to be concerned about the ability of private companies—including TikTok—to collect, aggregate, and use sensitive user data.” But, he explained, Texas’s ban cannot hope to ameliorate these problems “because it does nothing to address the root of the issue: the intrusive data collection practices themselves.” As Schneier noted, many other major online platforms, including Google, Facebook, and a host of other popular services, “collect as much data from their users as TikTok does from its users.” 

Even focusing on TikTok alone, Schneier explained that a ban on TikTok for public employees would not prevent the platform from collecting personal information about those users anyway. TikTok, for instance, can use tracking pixels embedded in third-party websites to collect data about a person’s IP address and browsing activity, even if that person does not have a TikTok account. Schneier concluded that a ban simply cannot “protect the data privacy of Texans because it does not restrict TikTok, or any other company, from collecting sensitive information.”

Schneier’s declaration also explained that, even as to any distinct concerns Texas may have about TikTok’s connections with China, banning TikTok will not prevent the Chinese government from collecting sensitive data from Americans if it wishes to do so. As he underscored, “[i]t would be trivial for the Chinese government to buy enormously detailed datasets about Americans.” And it could do so “without ever accessing the data collected by TikTok.” He wrote:

Even assuming that there is a significant likelihood that the Chinese government will acquire access to TikTok’s American-user data and that Texas’s TikTok ban will cut off that direct access (both questionable premises), the Chinese government can acquire Americans’ data from commercial data brokers, advertising aggregators, and other apps and devices that send or sell data directly to China.

To support this point, Schneier cited a recent report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which explained that the wide range of commercially available information sold by data brokers is already readily available to foreign governments. Thus, “[b]anning TikTok does not meaningfully limit the Chinese government’s ability to acquire data about Texans.”

Texas’ Ban Won’t Prevent the Spread of Disinformation or Threats to Cybersecurity

Schneier also explained why a ban on TikTok cannot effectively address the spread of disinformation. He noted that “all social media platforms, including American ones, can be exploited by foreign powers interested in influencing Americans.” Schneier highlighted several notable examples of recent disinformation campaigns originating from foreign governments—including attempts by Iranian nationals to influence voters during the 2020 election and by Russian operatives to interfere with the 2016 election—all of which were launched on US-based platforms. Governments like China’s “do not need to own or be closely associated with a platform” to disseminate disinformation to the United States.

A ban on TikTok likewise does little to address device and network security concerns. As Schneier explained, “[o]ther apps and devices, including American ones, can be used as vectors for malware or used to gain unauthorized access to networks and devices.” Banning TikTok would not, for instance, have done anything to prevent or mitigate the 2019 SolarWinds breach, which left the networks of over 14,000 clients exposed, including those belonging to prominent government offices like the National Institutes of Health, parts of the Pentagon, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Texas Can Address Its Concerns Without Banning TikTok

Schneier’s declaration also made clear that a ban is wholly unnecessary. He pointed to a number of policy alternatives that Texas could adopt to more directly address its concerns. For instance, regarding data collection, Schneier explained that “strong privacy legislation” that includes “better controls on data collection, sale, and aggregation by private companies” would “help secure data privacy” and “protect Americans in the long term” without requiring a broad ban on access to TikTok. This approach would be consistent with the “broad consensus among technology policy experts and the general public about the necessity of comprehensive data privacy regulation.”

Schneier similarly explained how concerns relating to device and network security could be addressed with a much narrower policy than an outright ban. Public universities, for instance, could “address security concerns by issuing dedicated devices to faculty engaged in TikTok-related research and by establishing dedicated networks for use of TikTok in research and teaching.” Such measures would be “trivial for public universities to implement” and would advance an interest in protecting device and network security without necessitating a broad ban.

Blocking Research Relating to TikTok Undermines Texas’ Goals

Finally, Schneier’s declaration stressed that banning TikTok is not only ineffective and unnecessary, it is counterproductive. A ban that prohibits public university faculty from accessing TikTok inhibits important research about the platform, “including work relating to data privacy, the spread of disinformation, and security”—the very interests Texas purports to advance. This research is necessary to better understand the potential risks TikTok might pose to those interests. For instance, Schneier pointed to a study conducted by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which performed a comprehensive security and privacy analysis of the TikTok app. As Schneier noted, “[u]nderstanding what sensitive information TikTok collects, how TikTok uses and secures this information, and who TikTok shares this information with is crucial to assessing the impact of those practices on user privacy and security.” These critical inquiries are precisely the kind of research that Texas’s ban hinders. (A separate declaration from Dr. Jacqueline Vickery explained how Texas’s ban specifically impairs her efforts to research and teach about TikTok, including its implications for youth privacy.)

Although Schneier’s declaration speaks directly to Texas’s TikTok ban and its effect on public university faculty in that state, his insights on why the ban is ineffective, unnecessary, and counterproductive are important to the broader discourse on the wisdom of such bans. To the extent that government officials believe that a ban on TikTok could address concerns about data collection, the spread of disinformation, device and network security, and even TikTok’s connections to China, Schneier’s declaration shows why a broad, categorical ban on the platform simply does not serve those interests. Policymakers and the public should pay attention.

This is especially true in Texas. Last December, Governor Greg Abbott imposed a TikTok ban, forbidding all state employees from using TikTok on any state-owned or state-issued equipment. The ban covers faculty at state universities who study the app, and Texas has allowed no exception for them. Researchers like Jacqueline Vickery, an associate professor at the University of North Texas who studies how social media is used for political organizing and self-expression, can no longer do their work.

After the ban took effect this spring, Vickery had to suspend research projects and abandon some of her teaching methods. Though some of her students report using TikTok more than Google, Vickery can no longer ask them to look at TikTok’s privacy policy, scrutinize its data collection or study how its algorithm works. Nor can Vickery and other Texas researchers investigate these vital matters themselves.

In a lawsuit brought by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research and the Knight First Amendment Institute challenging Texas’ TikTok ban, the groups argue that the ban violates the constitutional rights of public university professors. (We helped start the coalition which has hundreds of researchers, including Texas employees like Vickery, among its members.). This week, we asked the court to block the ban while the case is pending.

As we explain, the ban compromises academic freedom and impedes vital teaching and research, including research on the very risks that Texas says it wants to address. In imposing the ban, Gov. Abbott suggested that China, where TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is based, is using the app to “infiltrate” the United States and to threaten “our way of life.” Abbott wasn’t more specific and he was jumping on a bandwagon – at least 34 U.S. states have some form of a TikTok ban.

The best way to protect people from harms engendered by TikTok (and other social media platforms) is to unleash researchers so they can build up knowledge collectively. That’s the way we have long tackled other problems that harm people at scale, from smoking to infant mortality. As the sociologist Robert Merton famously observed, science is a communal public good. Each study draws from previous work, and contributes to a collective body of knowledge.

Our lawsuit asks that Texas preserve researchers’ freedom to do their crucial work. There are many ways to do this while achieving the ban’s ostensible objective. At minimum, there should be a carveout so that Texas academics can join journalists, activists and academics around the world learning what TikTok does and doesn’t do. Whatever means they select, Texas must preserve academic freedom, to protect both the Constitution and the public good. Independent research isn’t the problem, it’s a vital part of the solution. We hope the courts understand that.