Another Fatal Accident On TikTok: 17-YO Shot Dead When Filming A Video With Pistol

Back to two months ago, the internet was covered with pornographic videos that were created by TikTok users. While the popular app has over 120 million monthly active users in India, the number of daily cases relating to murder, accidental death, and abuse has kept increasing.

On the third day of April, the Madras High Court banned TikTok after it detected the alarming numbers of cyberbullying and pornographic content on the short-video app. Three weeks later, it decided to lift the ban.

According to the two justices including SS Sundar and N Kirubakaran, inappropriate videos only occupied 0.0006% on TikTok. That’s why they removed the ban on this Chinese app in Tamil Nadu and the ByteDance-owned app were committed not to hold obscene videos.

However, the result doesn’t seem optimistic as expected. As a piece of evidence, there has been a gradual increase in the number of cases of deaths, abuse, and murder caused by users who are looking for virtual likes and views.

On April 14, a TikTok user whose name is Salman Zakir, 19 years old, was shot dead while he was posing with a pistol along with his friends.

According to reports, Zakir and his two friends including Amir and Sohail traveled to India Gate. When coming home, Salman drove the car, and Sohail sat next to him and played with an India-made pistol. Sohail pointed it right at Salman while making the video, and unluckily, the pistol suddenly blew up.

After the incident happened, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology gave the command for both Apple and Google to remove the app from their own app stores.

At the time TikTok came back to the Indian market after the ban, ByteDance revealed that the Beijing-based company had deleted more than 6 million videos which allegedly breached its community guidelines and terms of use.

However, every effort from both the Indian government and ByteDance appears to make non-sense. There have been lots of videos concerning using pistols on this app. How do kids approach guns? Why have videos boasting about guns continued to go viral?

It seems that the company hasn’t actually managed to monitor the content on its platform. For example, in a recent case, a 17-YO boy called Pratik Wadekar from Shirdi died while filming a TikTok video with a homemade pistol.

Reports pointed out that Pratik, along with his relatives, was staying in a hotel room and wanted to make a video to boast about the gun which had been offered by his relatives.

Someone pressed the pistol’s trigger by accident and Pratik, unfortunately, became the victim. Of course, ByteDance has no legal obligation to compensate for what took place; however, its short-video making app has been clearly the ideal hub of pornographic and violent content. TikTok is also among the apps with the largest number of downloads at present.

On June 13, a young mom called Anitha, 24 years old, from Tamil Nadu, lost her life while shooting a video via TikTok. It was her strong passion for the Chinese app that made her scolded by her husband many times. The last time Anitha could use the app was when she was drinking poison in a white bottle, coughed, and then died.

Another case relating to TikTok videos was an accident in Punjab that took place in January 2019. The victim was a man.

Such these fatal accidents are continuing to go viral on TikTok every day before they are actually removed out of the famous platform.

On June 14, TikTok advised its users to use the platform to show their own creativity to the world, and once again, confirmed that

In spite of its efforts, lots of users mustn’t comply with this warning, especially when they are always looking for how to create unique videos (even in many unbelievably stupid ways).

It’s time for the makers to give more practical actions as well as to look for solutions to deal with the current situation, including the ban on this app at the global scale if necessary!