- The ban on the video messaging mobile app,
TikTok , has been lifted in India. ByteDance claims that TikTok has been losing 1 million users a day because of the ban.- The ban has weighed heavily on the company, resulting in losses of $500,000 a day and leaving more than 250 jobs vulnerable.
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In the two days that TikTok has been absent from the Google and Apple app stores, the company claims that it has been unable to complete six million download requests and missed out on nearly two million users.
Nonetheless, ByteDance plans to soldier on and invest another $1 billion in India over the span of the next three years.
Helena Lersch, the director of global policy at ByteDance, told the Economic Times that TikTok has received an "overwhelming positive" response from the industry, including the users and the mobile associations in the country. "I think we are a very safe app. We have industry-leading safety features on our app and our creators and users are using them," she said.
The app was banned in India on allegations of inappropriate content, encouraging pornography and potentially leading paedophiles to underage children. TikTok issued a statement thereafter explaining that any such ban "hurts free speech" — moreso, because the interim order was passed without allowing ByteDance or TikTok to defend itself.
The ban is another incident escalating the trend of content regulation on social networking platforms, a growing concern for a lot of tech giants — including Google, Facebook and Twitter.
See also:
An Indian court has banned TikTok for ‘encouraging pornography’
If you don’t have TikTok already, you won't be able to download it anymore
TikTok was bigger than Instagram last year after passing the 1 billion download mark