After India now Pakistan also banned the Short Video making app TikTok, Pakistan’s telecom regulator has banned TikTok, alleging the app failed to remove “immoral” and “indecent” content videos.
The ban begins just over a month after the regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, banned dating apps, including Tinder and Grindr dating apps, for the equivalent reason.
TikTok had been installed 43 million times in Pakistan, as per the analytics firm Sensor Tower. That made it the app’s 12th largest market in phases of installs.
The firm predicts TikTok has been installed 2.2 billion times total across Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.
TikTok was removed from play stores and Apple’s store in India over concerns around the app’s Chinese ownership.
The United States is yet proceeding to ban TikTok over those same concerns. The ban itself is currently on hold due to a court order, but other constraints are set to go into place in mid-November.
TikTok has lived a cultural phenomenon even as it gets under tremendous pressure from regulators across the globe.
But the ongoing bans — especially, the pending ban in the US pose real threats to the app’s increase, as they could generally cut off new installs in major markets like the US and India.
Regulators in Pakistan announced they gave TikTok “considerable time” to answer to their questions, but the TikTok is not responded to the Pakistan government questions.
A new transparency report reveals that government authorities in Pakistan asked TikTok to restrict 40 accounts during the first half of 2020. Still, the company only restricted two accounts of them from forty accounts.
