Indians Mass Attacking TikTok To Get It Banned, Again

TikTok has never stopped being a controversy in India. And when the country has not yet won its war against COVID-19, many people’s attention has been shifted to this latest trending hashtag on Twitter - #bantiktok.

The resentment some people show toward the short-video-sharing platform resurfaces again in the last few days when a video showing an acid attack went viral on the platform.

The controversial video was posted by Faizal Siddiqui, a TikTok’s influencer with 13 million followers. It shows Siddiqui lip-sync to a song and then splashed some kind of liquid onto a woman. However, that was all fake, the scars you see in the video were created by TikTok filters.

Answer to the backlash regarding the video, TikTok said it was not to encourage acid attacks but this does not seem to ease the rage of netizens.

On March 18, a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Tejinder Bagga, shared the video with Rekha Sharma, chief of the National Commission for Women. Sharma later talked to the Maharashtra police and TikTok India about the issue.

Laxmi Agarwal, a survivor of an acid attack and also an activist criticized the content of the short clip. In only one day, Siddiqui’s account was suspended for violating several community guidelines.

However, for some reason, after this incident, multiple videos promoting abuse and rape started surfacing on the Internet. Sharman later demanded banning TikTok for its lax management of content and also its tendency to push young people toward unproductive activities.

The acid attack video and what comes after it have increased the hatred of Indian netizens for TikTok. On Google Play, people are leaving bad reviews of the app, pushing its rating down to 1.3 stars.

Another reason for this latest trouble TikTok is in is thought to be caused by the controversial video of Carry Minati, a rising Indian YouTuber. In the video, Minati offended users of TikTok and named his clip "YouTube vs TikTok."

It later becomes the most-watched content of the YouTuber but later got removed for violating YouTube’s community guidelines. Those who sympathize with Minati joined the campaign to get TikTok banned under the hashtag "#justiceforcarry.”

This is the second time in a row TikTok is in trouble in India. Last year, the Madras High Court ordered an interim ban on the app citing that it encourages pornography and left children vulnerable to predators.

However, as we all know, the ban was lifted soon after that but it had to lay down stricter rules regarding content.

Even with the new rules, the hatred for the app remains. As the COVID-19 pandemic started in China, lots of Indians extent their resentment to the app. In April this year, the Telangana High Court receives a plea seeking to ban TikTok for hosting videos encouraging people to not follow safety guidelines.

The video-sharing platform saw 467 million downloads last year and is becoming even more popular when Indians are under lockdown. Recently, an alarming trend starts to surface with people acting to be abusive to women. For example, Kartik Aaryan, an actor, did a video showing him pulling a woman’s hair and pretending to throw her off a balcony for making a bad roti.

After facing backlash from netizens, the actor deleted the clip.

Even if TikTok gets banned in India, the real problem remains. The app needs to further stricken its guidelines on content, it is true, but the app is not solely responsible for all the abusive and vulgar content people post.

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