Happy Valentine’s, Comets! And welcome back to school! The spring semester has officially started and Valentine’s Day is coming up. For those that are celebrating the holiday, congratulations! And for those that won’t be celebrating, try to stay off social media on the 14th to avoid everyone’s relationships being shoved down your throat. The library is now open 24 hours on the weekdays again, so if you don’t have a special someone, have a date with those books. Work on yourself. Or… you can take online dating to the next level and play the newest installment of the famous fantasy dating sim series, Fire Emblem Engage.

One person that definitely isn’t thinking about Valentine’s Day is our brave and mighty governor, Greg Abbott. Governor Abbott is busy fighting anti-capitalism and protecting the people from what he perceives as a very large threat to Texas: the Chinese government. Comets, if you’ve noticed that your TikTok isn’t working when you’re on campus anymore, or if you read the email sent out by the university, you know that TikTok has been banned on our university campus. The ban started by prohibiting the use of TikTok on government issued devices for government jobs. A lot of the ban mandates were inconclusive with various departments at UTD (including our esteemed magazine), which left us wondering what changes they would have to make to comply with the new policy. 

However, once the start of the semester began, schools like UT Austin, Texas A&M, and our very own UTD decided to ban the use of TikTok on school wifi (excluding university housing). Republican members of our national government have cited their concerns about the Chinese-owned app being used to influence and manipulate those here in America—but in reality they’re just afraid to have their feeds expose them. Many other states in the US have already banned the use of TikTok for cybersecurity and content-based concerns. During our last presidential administration, Donald Trump talked about banning TikTok for similar reasons states have banned TikTok. So all in all, Republican members (former and present) of our government really hate TikTok; it will be interesting to see how this plays out. 

But let’s not think about that and focus on the real future: February 15th, Discount Candy Day.