Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has asked Google Play and App Store to remove the Chinese company’s ByteDance owned app Tik Tok.
It was launched as Douyin (Chinese: 抖音, pinyin: Dǒuyīn) in China in September 2016. After a year it was launched as Tik Tok in international markets. The app allows users to short looping videos of 3–60 seconds as well as create short music videos of 3–15 seconds. In India, the app was full of Bollywood dialogues, clips, memes, jokes etc apart from lip-synced songs of course.
Apps like Tik Tok uses artificial intelligence to bring forward personalized content for users.
Most downloaded app
To all Tik Tok fans, your favourite app was the top downloaded app last year surpassing likes of PUBG, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp etc.
In June 2018, 500 million monthly active users worldwide.
Tik Tok was quite famous with celebrities and is known to have great social media influence.
Addiction reduction feature
Since Tik Tok is highly addictive, an addiction reduction feature was added in 2018 which prompted users to take a break after every 90 minutes. A TikTok sign in would mean that someone has lost track of the world around him/her.
So now you may know why it is a serious concern for the world, however, there are many addictions in general life that people shall try to get rid off.
Security concerns, controversies and bans
In January 2019, an eminent institute Adam S Posen raised a concern about Tik Tok being a national security threat to the West as it sent location, images and biometric data to China. It was also accused of ability to manipulate public opinion.
In July 2018, it was banned in Indonesia, the ban, however, was lifted after TikTok hired 20 staff for censoring TikTok content.
In November 2018, Bangladesh banned TikTok following Jan 2019, the Chinese government said that it would censor 100 types of content.
Ban in India
It all started with several politicians demanding tight regulation or ban on Chinese App for inappropriate content such as cyberbullying, deepfakes and sexually explicit content.
Earlier a suicide ending game called ‘Bluewhale’ also took the world by storm.
As per media reports, there were some incidents Web hosting company of people getting injured or even killed while filming for TikTok. Tamil Nadu court banned TikTok stating that it was encouraging pornography.
Sakshi Bhandari, a Quora user said “It promotes NUDITY. yes, it does. Famous users of this app both girls and boys post themselves half naked or in clothes that hardly covers anything. Also, people these days are doing extremely stupid things like cutting their hands, putting every kind of things in their mouth and eyes, jumping from cliffs or high roof tops, doing stunts( even though they are not professional obvi) just for the sake of likes. “
After the court’s ruling ByteDance challenged Tamil Nadu’s court decision in Supreme Court, however, Supreme Court denied staying the order. Next hearing is on the 25th of April.
Meanwhile, TikTok is no longer available on Google Play, one can still download it from third party locations or shared apk files, however, we would like to inform that it is highly unsafe to do so.
So what do you think about the ban? Comment below and let us know.
