TikTok, a company which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance has has several ups and downs this year. According to SensorTower data from April, 30 percent of TikTok’s 2 billion downloads come from countries like India where it has been currently banned
India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has banned TikTok, WeChat, and several dozen other China-based apps it views as “engaged in activities … prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India,” according to a press release. A total of 59 apps are on the banned list.
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TikTok and WeChat did not immediately reply to requests for comment Monday. Messaging app WeChat is also owned by Chinese internet company Tencent, has more than 1 billion users worldwide.
India has banned Tiktok before. Last year, the government instructed Google and Apple to remove the app from their respective app stores over concerns about pornography on the platform. Indian lawmakers said TikTok was encouraging the spread of explicit content and “cultural degradation.” The ban was lifted after about a week.
Tensions between China and India are high, following an incident earlier this month at the border that left 20 Indian soldiers dead. It’s not clear how big a role the geopolitical situation had in India’s decision to ban TikTok. However, the platform has seen widespread criticism for ongoing security concerns; in February 2019, TikTok paid $5.7 million to the Federal Trade Commission over alleged violations of COPPA, a children’s privacy law. It had been allowing children under 13 years old to sign up for the app without parental consent. It’s since made changes to the app that increased parental controls.
It’s also not clear whether India’s ban on TikTok is somehow related to recent security concerns about how the app was handling clipboard content on some devices. Last week, users of a beta version of iOS 14 noticed that TikTok was accessing content on their devices’ clipboards, a practice the company had pledged to stop several months ago.
