TikTok Ban in India: Will it solve the "inappropriate content" issue?

Supreme court recently passed a new order to take out Tiktok app from Google Play Store and Apple App Store. For starters, Tiktok is a platform to create and short videos. Tiktok in India was initially called musically, and the two platforms merged to become the almighty Tiktok, which has a 13 million active user base, just in India.

Reason for the ban

A petition was raised against Tiktok in Madras High Court and Supreme Court of India, stating that the app exposes children to pornographic and inappropriate content. After a thorough investigation, the Supreme Court of India has passed an order to take out the app from the Apple and Google App store.

With the latest law in order, the TikTok app is no longer available on the Google Play Store or Apple App store in India. However, users can still use the app, if the app has been already installed on the smartphone. As the app is no longer available on the store, you will not receive any updates or new features, until further notice from the court.

Is using the TikTok app is illegal in India?

The latest decision from the Supreme court does not say anything about using the apps by individuals. In fact, one can easily download the app from third party websites, and it just works fine.

TikTok India officials have officially released a statement, which claims that users can continue to use the app to generate and share content without any issue, and the company is working day and night to bring back the app to the Apple Store and Play store.

TikTok and inappropriate content

Even I have used TikTok, and there are a dozen of apps, at least on the Google Play Store, which mimics TikTok and offers similar content. Due to the unprecedented grown, the TikTok app has come into the limelight.

In TikTok, users can create any sort of content, like most of the social media platforms. However, to get quick attention, some users have been creating shady and pornographic content on the platform, which is visible to the entire TikTok community. For certain extent, TikTok does remove content, which are highly inappropriate and some videos missout from the algorithm, which has caused this issue.

TikTok is not the only platform that has explicit and pornographic content, in fact, social media apps like Instagram and Facebook also face similar issues, and the robust algorithm and content monitoring team will make sure that the illegal and pornographic content is being removed as soon as possible.

Conclusion

You heard us right, TikTok is just the tip of the iceberg, and banning the app will not solve the issue, as millions of users have already installed the app on their phones. By removing TikTok from app stores, more apps with similar features will come into existence, which is a bigger problem to deal with.

According to me, de-listing the app from the Google Play Store and App Store is not a solution to control pornographic and inappropriate content. Instead, govt should bring in more laws, where content on apps like TikTok is continuously monitored to filter out inappropriate content at all time. Apps like TikTok should develop a better algorithm to filter the content, and the company should manually monitor the content, ensuring safe content for users under every age group.