From today onwards, the popular video-sharing app will be banned, as per Peshawar high court ruling. According to the high court, the ban will not be removed till objectionable content is removed. TikTok videos are spreading vulgarity in the society, Chief Justice of Peshawar High Court, Justice Qaiser Rashid Khan said.
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The director-general Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) told the High Court that they had approached the app developers for the removal of the indecent content but have not received any response from their side. To this, the court replied that until the TikTok officials cooperate with the regulatory authority, the app should remain banned.
The video-sharing app has been a target of several complaints and court petitions calling for its ban in Pakistan citing immoral content.
Last year in October, the PTA had banned TikTok after receiving complaints against immoral content on the app. The PTA said it had issued a final notice to the app and gave considerable time to respond and develop an effective mechanism for ‘proactive mechanism of unlawful online content’. A press release sent by the authority reads TikTok has failed to fully comply with the PTA’s instructions.
It must be noted that as of September 2020, TikTok had suspended 93,000 accounts and must have done many more to date.
Tiktok in Pakistan has been used by people from all sectors, people on the fringes — economically, socially, largely excluded from mainstream media. Working-class people, queer people, men who dress as women, women who dress as men, and professional bodybuilders who scarcely dress at all. People with hundreds of thousands, and often millions, of followers.
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Pakistan has always been divided on TikTok, where some say that it has given voice to sectors of the society which were marginalized in the mainstream while others complain of the immorality such content depicts is in contrast with the culture of the country.
Also, as we had seen in 2020, people did not leave TikTok and rather used untraceable IP addresses using VPN to access it, leaving it even harder for the authorities to regulate such apps. Let’s see how people react this time.