TikTok has been an addictive app of late across the world. The short video application wildly famous with lip-syncing teenagers around the world has taken India by storm, thus making India TikTok’s biggest global market. It has been learnt that out of half a billion users, more than 200 million users are known to be Indian and the majority of them are all kids and teenagers.
TikTok is an app that allows you to share short clips and the idea is to use dance or lip sync to ‘background music or movie dialogues’ to create the most viral clip. Recently, the app faced a massive backlash for exposing younger ones to “inappropriate” content.
Though it has massive growth in India, it has come largely under fire for promoting misleading content. It has also faced a ban a few months ago in April and now the situation has gone from bad to worse. There are possibilities that TikTok could get permanently banned In India after July 22 for promoting anti-national activities.
The Cyber Laws and e-Security division of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (aka MeitY) sent a notice to the creators of TikTok and Helo ByteDance to reply to 24 questions, after a complaint by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) affiliate Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) to the PM, where it alleged that the platforms are being used for encouraging and promoting anti-national and obscene activities.
ByteDance Inc., the Chinese internet giant behind TikTok, has a separate application called Douyin with similar features in China, where TikTok doesn’t function.
Earlier, Prominent lawmaker Shashi Tharoor of the main Congress party told Parliament that applications like TikTok are a “national security” threat and Indians are vulnerable to spying through the application due to nation’s severe data protection regulations.
He is also very much concerned that like other apps from China, TikTok has too a close relationship with China’s government. Tharoor went on to add saying that ByteDance’s paid influence could affect India’s democratic processes.
The Chinese billionaire behind TikTok is a 36-year-old tech guru taken the app to global success. Zhang Yiming’s Beijing-based startup ByteDance owns TikTok.
Since launching in the year 2017, TikTok has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times, as per US-based research agency Sensor Tower. It has a massive following in India, the US, Indonesia and elsewhere.
ByteDance operates a Chinese version of TikTok- Douyin. It is the top short video application in China, with over 400 million monthly active users, according to iResearch. Douyin was launched in 2016 and it attracted top celebrities like Chinese actor and singer Kris Wu.