WASHINGTON - Temoc, the curiously muscular mascot of the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas), is cavorting on his TikTok page – dancing, posing and drawing attention to the college’s trends and events.

But the playful online days of the blue-skinned, orange-maned anthropomorphic comet may be numbered after UT Dallas on Tuesday became one of the latest public universities since early December to block TikTok from their networks over cyber-security concerns.

Oklahoma’s Northeastern State University has blocked TikTok since Dec 9.

Marketing major Eric Aaberg, 23, who worked on UT Dallas’ TikTok page and helped produce the Temoc videos, lamented the decision on Wednesday in a TikTok clip that has been viewed more than 38,000 times.

“I spent years making that cute,” said Mr Aaberg as a screenshot of Temoc floated overhead, “and people loved it, and now it just rots away.” “This is my job. This is what I do for a living,” he added. “It’s not banned publicly; as an individual, you can still use it. But it’s just crazy because it’s a step closer to that, which is scary for a lot of people.”

This follows recent TikTok bans by state governments, which have disallowed the use of the video hosting app on government-issued devices over concerns that user data could be harvested and shared with the Chinese government.

Opposition to TikTok has been mounting in Congress, with both Republican and Democrat lawmakers pushing fresh legislation on Dec 13 that would ban the app entirely, citing it as a national security threat.

But the bans have been met with a backlash from students who habitually use the app and are sceptical about the US-China rivalry, and from some employees, for whom the app is a key source of research data or channel for student outreach.

Over the past month, public universities in Alabama, Georgia, Texas and other states have limited access to TikTok on campus Wi-Fi and devices, in line with directives from state governors.

The federal government and more than half of the 50 states have already restricted TikTok access on government networks and devices, as the Biden administration works out a deal on whether TikTok can continue operating in the United States.

“The university is taking these important steps to eliminate risks to information contained in the university’s network and to our critical infrastructure,” the University of Texas in Austin’s technology adviser Jeff Neyland said in a schoolwide e-mail last week.

“As outlined in the governor’s directive, TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices – including when, where and how they conduct Internet activity – and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government,” he added.

TikTok spokesman Jamal Brown, however, said in a statement to US media outlets last week that the ban impacted universities’ ability to share information, recruit students and build student communities. “We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cyber security in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods,” he said.

For now, students can get around the campus ban by accessing TikTok using mobile data or on their personal wireless networks.

Analysts said the bans have their merits despite these workarounds.

Ms Hannah Kelley, a technology and national security research assistant at the Centre for a New American Security, said on Thursday that US higher education has long been a target for critical research theft.

“These campus bans are not aimed at policing user engagement, but rather at ensuring that such engagement does not take place on college or university networks or devices where critical information is stored and/or accessed,” she told The Straits Times.

“Students are largely free to continue engaging on their own devices and data plans or off-campus networks as access through these channels does not pose the same infrastructural risks to the institutions themselves,” she added.

And while the device or network bans were not a perfect long-term solution, Ms Kelley called them “a prudent step to take in the near term to mitigate immediate concerns” while awaiting the Biden administration and TikTok’s negotiations and tracking how the new Congress approaches the issue.

UT Dallas’ Mr Aaberg, who makes and posts 20 to 25 TikTok videos a week, called the ban a form of censorship and told ST on Thursday that he favoured better privacy laws over blocking the app because of data concerns.

“I think the state is just playing a political game,” he said, adding that he was not concerned about TikTok’s parent company ByteDance being in China.

“It’s up to the individual to take that data privacy risk. But we also have that risk when we use Meta, Facebook, for instance… Every app tracks your location – that’s not that scary. They don’t really care for the general consumer,” said Mr Aaberg, who is also head of social strategy at the Gen Z-focused social media agency TGR Creative.

Eliminating TikTok entirely from American life would also be deeply unpopular, if not next to impossible, because of what a cultural juggernaut it is. About two-thirds of American teens use the app, for entertainment or even their primary source of news.

“I don’t know a single friend who doesn’t have TikTok or hasn’t been exposed to it,” said Mr Aaberg. “TikTok is the most used app from Gen Z. It’s where we all are.”