Possible TikTok ban has U.S. science communicators on edge

For biologist Brooke Fitzwater, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, the social media platform TikTok has become a key tool for sharing her knowledge of marine biology with some 250,000 followers. Her short, humorous videos on everything from whale sharks to zombie worms have attracted up to 2.1 million views. “TikTok has been an unparalleled way for me to communicate science to the public,” Fitzwater says. Last week, however, Fitzwater and many other science communicators who rely on TikTok got some worrying news: The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to approve legislation that would ban the popular application in the United States unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it to non-Chinese owners. Backers of the measure argue it blunts a potential threat to U.S. national security, because Chinese law requires ByteDance to provide user data to the Chinese government upon request. Civil liberties groups and others have raised concerns that the legislation infringes on free speech rights, but President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law if the Senate approves it. (The federal government and several dozen U.S. states already ban TikTok on employee devices used for work.) Given that TikTok has 150 million users in the U.S., a ban would “cut off my access to a lot of people,” Fitzwater says. And although she and other science communicators could shift their outreach to other platforms, such as Instagra...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news