Rather than focus on improving the standard of education, the administration of Islamia College University of Peshawar is focused on curbing freedom of expression. The university administration forced five of its students to delete their TikTok accounts.
Given that they are an educational institute, the administration ought to be familiar with basic law and legislation. Deleting students’ social media accounts may have been a step too far.
According to ARY News, the administration forced the five students to delete their profiles on the video-sharing app after receiving complaints against them. Apparently the university administration was ‘annoyed’ with the excessive use of the app.
Ironically one of the students had registered a complaint on the Prime Minister’s complaint cell against the excessive use of TikTok on campus grounds.
He reportedly wrote that the excessive use of TikTok on campus grounds could create problems for female students.
While most educational institutes have a no cellphone use policy in classes, they cannot prohibit people from making the personal choice to use a social networking app or any other e-service.
TikTok has over 500 million active users globally. The mobile app had already crossed a billion downloads from PlayStore last year. The app is particularly popular among millenials, teens, and tweens.
Like most new-age practices, older generations are irked by the video-sharing platform. In India parents even petitioned to have the app banned in certain states.
So far there have been at least 40 reported TikTok related deaths. In most of these cases of young people who lost their lives while making TikTok videos were reported in India.
