The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has banned the globally popular TikTok app in the country. He cited the short video creation and sharing app as failing to remove "immoral" and "lewd" content. The ban comes about a month after the same regulator banned the use of well-known dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr or SayHi. The reason was the same as with TikTok.
According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, TikTok has been downloaded 43 million times in the country, making it the twelfth largest market for the app in that regard. At this point, let's recall that globally, TikTok has already recorded more than two billion downloads, with the most users - 600 million - not surprisingly, in its home country of China.
The ban comes just months after TikTok (and dozens of other Chinese apps, including the popular social network WeChat) was banned by neighboring India. According to the government there, all these apps were "involved in activities that harmed the sovereignty and integrity of India".
The authorities in Pakistan let it be known that TikTok, or its operators, ByteDance, were given "a considerable amount of time" to respond to their concerns, but this has not been fully done, they say. TikTok's recent transparency report shows that the government asked its operator to remove 40 "objectionable" accounts in the first half of this year, but the company only deleted two.
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TikTok said in a statement that it has "robust protections" in place and hopes to return to Pakistan.
