As the US House of Representatives passed legislation which could lead to a ban on TikTok, a short format video sharing platfrom which has around 170 million American users, it was the Indian government which first decided to block the platform in the world.
On June 29, 2020 (during COVID-19), TikTok, a platform which was controlled by Chinese giant ByteDance, was banned in India. It was the largest market for the social media platform besides China.
The government blocked TikTok along with other 59 Chinese applications because of security concerns. Since then, India has banned over 300 Chinese apps, including Shareit, WeChat, Likee, Helo and more. The government has also blocked several betting and loan apps in the last few years, which were traced to Chinese links.
All these apps were found to violate Section 69 of the IT Act and contained materials which were deemed as a threat to India’s sovereignty and integrity.
After the ban, TikTok sacked its entire Indian staff which had around 40 employees.
In 2020, the Indian Army also asked its personnel to delete 89 mobile apps, including several Chinese apps, from their smartphones to curtail leakage of information.
TikTok is considered a security threat because of its links to the Chinese government and lawmakers and officials have said that Beijing can access data on people through the app. Even the US government stated that India was the first country to ban the platfrom due to the policy breach. TikTok has argued that the data on Americans is stored in the US.
In November last year, Nepal announced a ban on TikTok, saying that its content “was detrimental to social harmony”.
Meanwhile, India now has reached more than 250 million users on short-form video platforms, with around 70 per cent of them coming from tier-2 cities and other semi-urban and rural centres — often from middle and high-income backgrounds, according to the latest reports.
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Inputs from IANS
