The new feature in TikTok is campus verification, which enables college students to communicate with classmates through the application. The predicate is comparable to the earlier years of Facebook, when the phenomenon was initially employed to connect Harvard students before it became widespread.
Campus verification allows students to add their school and graduation year to their profile using an academic email address. Once verified, they can view a list of other students on their campus, filter by graduation year, and see the most-followed profiles first in the list view. This aspect can promote TikTok as a center where a viewer can find short videos, offering students the possibility to locate peers.
The site is positioning itself as a place where people can reconnect and engage in social interactions that are present in the real world. This can be an excellent method used by many students to develop a friendship, study group, or it can keep a student more connected at the university. It equally aligns with TikTok’s more comprehensive interest in ensuring the application becomes a platform of community and belonging as opposed to entertainment.
TikTok is facilitating the rollout of the partnership with universities with a student verification platform to verify that their users are attending the schools that they claim. This feature is deployed to over 6,000 universities, therefore being widely accessible. Such a scale may put TikTok at a massive advantage over rivals such as Instagram, which has reportedly been testing a similar feature but has not implemented it yet.
Meanwhile, the action raises a few privacy concerns. Tying a personal TikTok profile to a school name and graduation date can or may reveal more information than a student might be willing to divulge. The fear is that people are more likely to be tracked and contacted in ways that are not necessarily comfortable to them.
TikTok should pay much attention to the way students might use the feature and deploy extra security measures. All in all, campus verification can be seen as the effort by TikTok to introduce a hybrid channel between online communication and real-life identity. Students could also find it helpful to mingle with new people and feel that they belong somewhere in their school.
In the case of TikTok, it marks the entry point of extending its purpose beyond entertainment to connection in a similar model as Facebook, but with a new generation.
