India Govt Forces TikTok App Off Google, Apple Over ‘Porn’

Last year, India began blocking porn sites nationwide, and the crackdown continued earlier this month when a high court in that country ordered the government to ban not a porn site, but the wildly popular China-based app TikTok, in part for “encouraging porn,” as AVN.com reported.  As of Wednesday, the app—used to shoot and share short videos—disappeared in India from the major app stores, Google Play and the Apple online store, according to NBC News. The removals from the Google and Apple download stores apparently came a a result of a letter sent by the government’s Information Technology Ministry. A source inside Google acknowledged that the app was blocked as a result of the government order, NBC reported. Apple had not commented as of Thursday as to why the wildly popular app was suddenly unavailable in their store in the world’s second-most populous country. TikTok exceeded one billion total downloads as of last month, according to The Next Web, with about 25 percent of those, approximately 250 million, coming in India alone. According to data published by Statista, so far in 2019 India accounts for TikTok’s largest market, and it’s not even close. Indian consumers accounted for 41.7 million downloads in the first three months of 2019 alone, more than twice as many as the second-largest market, the United States, where the app was downloaded 16 million times. ByteDance, the Chinese software company that makes TikTok, filed an appeal against the ban, but that appeal was rejected. However, the appeal will get a second hearing of April 22, according to a report by the Guardian.  The controversy over the app began in India in October of last year, according to a timeline published by the site Quartz.com, when a 24-year-old man committed suicide after a campaign of online harassment against him over a TikTok video showing him in women’s clothing. Politicians then began to publicly call for the app to be banned, saying that TikTok “encourages pornography” and leads to “sexual perversity” in children. In February, the top government IT official in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu called on the country’s central government to ban TikTok for “degrading culture and encouraging pornography.” On April 1, the high court in the state of Madras ordered a ban on TikTok—and prohibited media from showing any videos created using the TikTok app. The efforts culminated on Monday, when India’s Supreme Court refused to strike down the Madras court’s ban, leading the government to order the app to come off of the Google and Apple stores. Photo By Toutiao / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain