Also why the hell should a government care what is on a random students phone?

They don’t. They care about what is on their network. As I said twice, you can use TikTok by turning off WiFi. Or by going to another WiFi at, say, a coffee shop.

It’s about studying and understanding the socioeconomic impacts of these apps, it’s about research.

Which is valuable, absolutely. But I’m not sure it’s the responsibility of the network operator to take extra precautions that make researchers operating with potentially unsafe software safe to have on their network.