After much speculations and mixed responses, Madras High Court has finally lifted the interim ban on the video app TikTok which has over 54 million users all across India. However, it has stated its conditions under which if TikTok fail to curb the uploading of pornographic content, court proceedings would start again.
The case was filed by Advocate Muthukumar and on 3rd of April; Madras High Court passed directions to the centre for banning the download of the video app all over India due to issues regarding its “pornographic” videos. Following this, TikTok got blocked from Google Play Store as well as Apple’s App Store since 18th of April.
Another petition accusing the app for degrading culture and encouraging pornography is on hearing at the Madras High Court’s Madurai bench. The petition raised concerns over child users of the app being vulnerable and getting exposed to cyber crime and sexual predators.
What do the owners have to say?
ByteDance, the developer of TikTok, claims that 85 per cent of TikTok users are adults and only a very little amount of videos on the app can be considered as inappropriate. ByteDance, the developer of TikTok is going through a humongous financial loss of around $500,000 as the government banned the app. It has also put more than 250 jobs at stake and as per the social media firm, it ended up losing a million new users daily and it took a hit on ByteDance’s goodwill. The High Court stated that the inappropriate content of TikTok was a very dangerous part of it. While on the other hand, the Chinese firm ByteDance, in its petition, claimed that such kinds of restrictions would “hurt free speech” and the interim order was made without hearing the company.
In the past few months, TikTok gained immense popularity in India and every other kid and teenager could be seen lip-syncing to famous dialogues and song lyrics. India was the primary market of the app and not that it has been banned in the country, it’s but obvious for the company to suffer heavy losses, so much so that, the company is bleeding half a million dollars every single day!
Not only the everyday loss of revenues, TikTok is losing millions of users day by day and this has put over 250 jobs at risk. Let’s hope this ban turns out to be a sensible move and doesn’t do more harm than good to the firm as well as the public.