अब आप न्यूज्ड हिंदी में पढ़ सकते हैं। यहाँ क्लिक करें
Home » India » India planning to crack down on Chinese video app TikTok?

India planning to crack down on Chinese video app TikTok?

India is not the first to raise these concerns. In 2018, Indonesia had temporarily banned TikTok for “pornography, inappropriate content and blasphemy”.

By Newsd
Published on :
TikTok Ban in India: Google takes down Chinese app from Play Store

The Chinese social media app, TikTok has taken the world by storm, but its skyrocketing popularity amongst teens has started to draw some unwanted attention, making Indian regulators likely to crack down on the app.

Until now, Indian officials have primarily focused on regulating US technology giants such as Amazon and Facebook but the meteoric popularity of Chinese app TikTok has now ruffled feathers.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, the most valuable startup in the world. In November 2017, ByteDance acquired lip-syncing Musical.ly and broke into US markets with TikTok. The app filled the gap left by the shuttering of Vine for user-generated, short videos, and added at least 20 million new users every month since December 2017.

Going by the records provided in a report of TechCrunch, India alone accounted for 27 percent of new installs between December 2017 and December 2018, and last month was the source for 32.3 million of TikTok’s 75 million total new downloads — a 25 times increase from last year.

Recently, the app has been the subject of troubling reports about its “dark” side, which is reportedly filled with child predators, devious algorithms, dark patterns, and teens bullying and harassing one another.

For the same, Indian government is drafting legislation to force the micro-vlogging platform to moderate the content posted by its hundreds of millions of users.

Also read: UP: Daughter’s father thrashes teen boy in public for posting her picture in TikTok video

New Rules for TikTok

Indian regulators want the platform-owners to be more responsible for the stuff that flows through their networks.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is said to have proposed new rules for app. It requires the company to establish a local office and appoint a senior official in the country who would be held responsible for any legal hassles that could arise from the nature of the content on the apps.

In addition, the draft law also calls for apps to deploy automated tools for proactively identifying and removing or disabling public access to unlawful information or content.

There are also demands for the Chinese app to store user data in India as opposed to sending them to servers in China.

Interestingly, India is not the first market to have raised these concerns. In 2018, Indonesia had temporarily banned TikTok for “pornography, inappropriate content and blasphemy”.

Related