“Ms. James”, a public school teacher in a tiny rural Southern town, discovered that her virtual students were not seeing the grammar lessons she assigned them in December 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Until she uploaded them to TikTok, that is.
Her discovery of the social media site and subsequent creation of her profile as
“In a day, I had one thousand followers, in a week I had ten thousand, and in six weeks I had one hundred thousand followers,” she stated to Reuters.
The fifteen-year instructor went on, “Within six months, I had a million and a half,” requesting that her full name not be used for privacy’s sake.
She currently has 5.8 million TikTok followers, but there is a threat to her instructional content.
Last week, the US House of Representatives passed a bill by an overwhelming majority that would give ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, roughly six months to sell off the US assets of the short-video app or risk being banned.
It poses the biggest risk to the app and the content providers who use it to reach large audiences and frequently make a living since the Trump administration.
“When you talk about the ban, you are talking about taking access to high quality educational videos away from people who have used it to enhance their education,” said Ms. James.
Although kids from elementary school to college use her TikTok classes, the majority of her followers are English.
Ms. James feels that her legacy is to use education to better the world, and she worries that a ban would be harmful. She has produced videos on vocabulary and subject-verb agreement.
According to NaomiHearts, a content creator with 1.1 million followers who made films about fatphobia and trans Chicana identity for TikTok, “I think that TikTok is a wealth of knowledge,” she told Reuters.
She also worries that her own and other varied, educational information will be silenced by the prohibition.
But Karen North, a lecturer at the University of Southern California, alerts her students to the risk that TikTok poses to personal information.
According to North, who founded and served as the previous director of USC Annenberg’s Digital Social Media program, “my concerns with TikTok are less about what information is provided or manipulated or whether it’s skewed toward one message or another,” as reported by Reuters.
The focus is mostly on the type of personal data that individuals willingly provide to a third party that lacks the same privacy regulations as the United States. The main problem with TikTok is that,” she continued.
North, a former Clinton administration staffer on Capitol Hill who worked in the White House, is concerned that the Chinese company’s use of features like location tracking and face recognition puts users at risk more than the app’s entertaining features, which include academic benefits.
Content creator Dr. Anthony Youn thinks the prohibition will seriously impair the accessibility of information. He is well-known for his instructional TikTok films that discuss his work as a plastic surgeon.
With 8.4 million followers, Dr. Youn told Reuters, “There’s a huge segment of TikTok where you get your news, so it’s about being educated.”
In a similar vein, NaomiHearts believes that the restriction is more about depriving users of educational content than it is about safeguarding data, as other applications also gather private information.
