Indian High Court Lifted The Ban On TikTok

The Indian High Court has lifted the ban on the download of TikTok, allowing the app to be featured on Apple and Google’s store. After the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology put forward a proposal to prohibit this short video sharing app as it is believed to encourage pornographic content and help predators to stalk children.

If the ban was to be implemented for real, users who have already had the app on their phones would not see much of a difference. However, this prohibition still had a heavy impact on the financial situation of ByteDance, the startup behind TikTok. The company’s spokesperson said that this incident had costed it Rs. 4.5 crore a day and may take away the job of more than 250 people.

India is a gold mine for ByteDance. So far, the app has had over 1 billion downloads and more than 300 million users across the country. In just a year, Indian users make up around 27% of the app’s total users.

However, this much development is not without any obstacle. Some of the country’s politicians and a lot of parents worry that the platform contains inappropriate content that minors can have access to. In answer to this concern, TikTok said that just a small portion of the videos on the platform are not suit for children and it has deleted over 6 million of them.

This is not the first occasion TikTok got into trouble with a country’s government. Earlier this year, the company was subjected to a fine of $5.7 million by the US regulator for breaking the COPPA law regarding the privacy of children. Along with the fine, there is a requirement for the company to set up an age bar.

In answer to the Court’s decision to lift the ban, TikTok’s representative said that they would try harder to keep the platform free of inappropriate content.