AUSTIN, TX—A federal district court in Texas issued a ruling late yesterday dismissing a legal challenge to the state’s TikTok ban filed earlier this year by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research. 

“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, [email protected].