Indian Government Asked Google And Apple To Take Down TikTok

Previously this month, the central government has received a directive from the Madras High Court to ban TikTok, reasoning it “encourages pornography.” Now the app is expected to be officially taken offline after the Supreme Court refused to let the app stay.

A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Gogoi reported the matter for the hearing that will take place on April 22. For the time being, Meity (the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) has requested both Google and Apple to remove the app from their platforms.

TikTok has taken India in particular and the world in general by storm. It currently has about half a billion users with the number of Indian users accounts for 119 million. Most of them are teenagers and kids.

TikTok is a product of Chinese company ByteDance which allows users to record 15-second videos. The idea behind it is to make short viral videos which can be shared across the platform. Recently, the app is receiving criticism for exposing young users to inappropriate and sleazy content.

This is due to the surprisingly large number of older men using the app in India. It has been called the haven for pedophiles. But whether a ban would fix this problem or not is a different question.

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.

As per TikTok, the company disagrees with the ban and the accusation it is facing, criticizing it as “disproportionate, discriminatory and arbitrary.”  The company has not really accepted all the blame, only saying that it has been trying to improve its content moderation and filters. According to the platform, it has taken down “over 6 million videos that violated the ToS in India."