TikTok launched a new feature to let college students find and connect with classmates, boosting campus social networking.
TikTok is introducing a new feature that enables college students to locate and establish connections with others on their campus, resembling Facebook’s early days.
The institution Verification feature allows users to add their college institution to their TikTok profile and browse through a list of students at their school.
Users must navigate to their profile and select the “Add school” option to use the feature. Subsequently, they must specify their graduation year and enter the name of their institution.
They must submit their academic email address to confirm that they attend the institution they registered with. Graduation year and college name will be displayed on their profile upon completion.
Users can subsequently navigate to the page of their school, filter by graduation year, and view all of the users who have added the school to their profile. The users list can also be sorted to display the most-followed users first.
TikTok’s partnership with UNiDAYS, a student verification platform that verifies student status, has made the feature accessible at over 6,000 universities.
According to TikTok, the concept behind the feature is to transform the platform into a hub for real-world connections and belonging on campus. This is the same as Facebook’s original mission, which was introduced in 2004 as a means for Harvard students to connect.
College students seeking to establish connections with their peers on campus may find the new feature of TikTok to be a beneficial addition.
Nevertheless, it also raises concerns about digital privacy, as it could facilitate the tracking of others online. Of course, the feature is optional, so individuals who wish to maintain a distinct distinction between their TikTok presence and their academic life may select to exclude their school from their profile.
It is essential to mention that the launch coincides with Instagram’s testing of a comparable feature last year, enabling users to display their school information and graduation year on their profile and communicate with other students.
Whether the feature was discontinued or the Meta-owned platform still intends to implement it is unclear.