Research is way more than just “valid sources” as though it’s only based on what is cited on the final peer-reviewed papers. In the process of researching something you might want to watch lectures, see different short materials, tutorials on how to set up specific software and access all sorts of educational and information YouTube. Besides that social media is frequently used by scientists themselves both to communicate between each other as well as to make accessible materials for non-scientists. And that is not even including research that requires looking into those social media, like say social media analysis.
I’m not sure when have you last taken part in academic research but social media has been an important part of researcher life for longer than it has been for the average public. Get down from your high horse if you know nothing about that.
Did you know a lot of research is both posted on and based on those “time wasting” sites such as Youtube, Twitter and TikTok? Since social media is such a big fixture of our societies, social scientists basically depend on them for a lot of cool research that is now getting blocked by nonsense. Not to mention that “state networks” means literally public Wi-Fi. How terrified are you of TikTok that you’re more afraid of it hacking your Wi-Fi than literally every other proprietary software?
That ban also applied to public universities in Texas, which moved to block TikTok from campus Wi-Fi networks and school-owned devices. Texas A&M and the University of Texas were among the colleges that complied with the ban, limiting access to the hit social video app across their campuses.
They are literally barring its use through public university Wi-Fi. Not even needing to get into the hypocrisy of banning TikTok but not similar shit like Instagram, or the fact that both university students and professionals use TikTok both for social connections and for work, it is a clear curtailing of a form of communication over others through the government. Would banning lemmy.world from some public internet connections not be an infringement on the unalienable right to assemble and speech? RTFA.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but as an AI language model, I don’t have direct access to books or copyrighted materials like “The Bedwetter” by Sarah Silverman.
Pack it up, guys!
On a serious note corporations abusing authors’ copyrighted work is on an entire different level to civilian piracy and I hope they get seriously shafted over it. Same thing for Bing and Bard. All of chatGPT is built on dubious or outright illegal datasets and there is no reason huge multinationals shouldn’t at least pay and inform the authors of those works. But in reality the blame will probably be shifted to the libraries.