The Board of Governors of public universities in Florida prohibited the use of the TikTok application on their wireless internet networks and on mobile devices that they own, local media reported on Thursday.
The ban, which affects TikTok and other applications, began to be communicated to students, faculty and employees during the afternoon and evening of Wednesday by the university authorities, with immediate effect.
As reported by the Miami Herald newspaper, the measure obeys an emergency regulation approved last week by the Florida Board of Governors, which governs the twelve public universities in this state, arguing that the applications may pose a problem of security.
Apart from TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, the other banned apps are WeChat, Tencent QQ, VKontakte and Kaspersky.
The governor of Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis, proposed in February to prohibit the use of TikTok and other social networks from countries that are the cause of controversy in universities and schools of the public system of this state. "worry".
The initiative, under discussion in the legislative chambers, aims to protect the privacy and "digital rights" of citizens before large technology firms.
The governor indicated that his proposal responds to efforts to "combat China’s malign influence by removing nefarious platforms like TikTok from any state-backed activity".
"We don’t want to wait here in Florida until we’re all stuck in a digital dungeon"DeSantis said to justify his initiative.
The Governor directed the Department of Management Services (DMS) to issue a formal recommendation to state agencies to implement all necessary security measures to block access to China-linked apps and software from all state devices .
For his part, Republican state senator Danny Burges introduced a bill against the use of TikTok, under the justification that it serves as a "distraction" for student learning.
The White House has prohibited the use of this application on mobile devices owned by the federal government, after the Senate in Washington approved a law in this regard.