Reasons Why Issuing A TikTok Ban In India Won’t Solve Anything

The Madras High Court has sent a request to the central government to issue a TikTok ban. If you don’t know what TikTok is. It is a social networking platform developed by Chinese technology company ByteDance. The app has taken India by storm recently. The High Court accuses it of encouraging pornography and wants it to be removed.

The app is similar to Vine, which was also very popular in 2016 and 2017. The idea behind it is to make short viral videos which can be shared across the platform. Just a short time after its launch, TikTok has had more than 54 million monthly active users around India. Over 100 million users have downloaded the app.

It is important to understand that the ban is not out of nowhere. Lately, there has been a petition against the app from Muthu Kumar, a Madurai-based social activist, and senior lawyer, stating children were made unprotected to sexual predators in the app. That’s why he asked the High Court to take action and send the order to the central government.

The judges in charge of the case, Justices SS Sundar and N Kirubakaran, have given the central government a deadline of April 16. If the central government did not respond by that time, the High Court intends to implement regulations for children safety in the app.

For its part, TikTok has claimed it is committed to ensuring users a safe environment, yet it seems like they don’t actually take any measures to stop the Madras HC’s fear from coming true. And those fears are not groundless.

In other European countries and the US, TikTok is mostly used by pre-teens and teenagers. The app’s operation, which lets its user record 15-second videos to existing songs, was what really made it become popular.

That is not the same in India. Besides young users, what surprises and worries people is a large number of older men using the app. And not all of them have good intentions.

A survey in November from Times of India suggested that TikTok is like a sanctuary for pedophiles.  Child safety activists alert that TikTok-similar apps can easily be abused to exploit children in sexual ways. At that time, one activist said:

His saying still holds true.

It’s easier for predators to persuade children to appear in front of the cameras when they think that it is just a fun game. After that, they can be tailored and coerced into child pornography.

The problem here is while a TikTok ban might seem to be the best solution, but it is actually not effective. TikTok by itself is a copycat product. And there are a lot of other apps similar to it were created due to its massive popularity. Banning TikTok and others will show up and take its place.

It might be more effective if every time an incident related to pornography or child abused shows up, TikTok’s developers need to pay heavy fines. By doing this, they are required to moderate the platform strictly. To get rid of abusers, extremists, and harassers, the necessary thing to do is to de-platform them from their safe haven, instead of just blocking them.

So, a ban will mean nothing as TikTok will likely use VPN service to avoid the ban. Others might change to other platforms. What left is the same existing problem keep happening again and again.

Last year, a TikTok ban was issued by the Indonesian government on similar grounds. Later on, the ban was lifted as TikTok vowed to take measures against inappropriate content.