"ByteDance’s applications TikTok and Helo are hugely popular among India’s teen and pre-teen population, especially in smaller towns. Many Chinese apps, including TikTok, have come under fire not only in India but also in the US, the UK, Hong Kong and Indonesia for content that is often dangerously close to exposing children to nudity and possibly those who seek to coerce or groom underage users into committing explicit acts."
Saved you a click. The rest of the article is fluff.
In its petition to the Supreme Court [snip] The app was like any other social media platform, it said, adding that singling out TikTok was discriminatory and arbitrary.
Eroding freedoms based on "for the children" is a slippery slope but in this case I believe it is well justified. There is a gross amount of what I'd call sexual aggression in these apps between primarily older males towards younger, often underage, girls (and boys). Users treat these apps like porn sites, whether its to view public instagram photos, private messages, or even public comments. If you cannot police the worst of these activities I do not believe governments should allow companies to profit off them.
YouTube also blocked two PewDiePie videos and their comments sections in India on behalf of the high court following a corporate defamation suit. Lately it's not unusual for Indian courts to censor specific media productions and platforms.
When did this happen? I can access the channel from India. Was it something that was temporary?
(I do want to support individual producers over corporate houses, but the whole PewDiePie vs. T-Series has a lot of racist and xenophobic overtones. This is what seems strange. Not all Indians like the T-Series brand, which has stood for cheap mass-market music and terrible quality cassettes once upon a time, but when the brand is vilified for being Indian in the comments sections, I feel revulsion towards the commenters.)
Which is ironic, as one of those two videos has a specific section about it legally not being defamation. The Indian courts granted an ex parte injunction against pewdiepie though because he didn’t show up in court in India.
>It must be noted all the claims put forward by PewDiePie to T-Series were false. Pewdiepie in his Congratulations video talked about tax evasions, relation of T-Series with mafia, and a very big blame of sexual assault.
>Pewdiepie didn't stop here and said that Indians have poo poo in their brains. He made fun of Caste system and poverty in India.
>The High Court said that the songs have “repeated comments made which are abusive, vulgar and also racist in nature,”
The next hearing on this case is some time in July. I think the defamation part will be looked into then.
I am happy the court put a ban on his videos so quickly. Assuming he didn't have any intentions other than making money, he was purposefully creating more controversy so that he can make even more money as though $10-15 million he makes every year now is not good enough. By banning the videos, the court at least denied him the Indian view counts.
It's no better on the desktop. With uBlockOrigin, I can see 33 primary domains (ad and social networks), and 3 times that number secondary ones, blocked.
AFAIK India is TikTok's second largest market after its native China.
There's big money at stake here. ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, is one of the most valuable private companies in the world: its last fundraising round was at a valuation of $75 billion USD.
There's a lot of Chinese investment in the Indian tech sector and the Chinese phone manufacturers basically own the Indian smartphone market. I don't see why they'd have problems with Chinese apps, in particular.
Check out Weibo, there's already a Proud Han army furiously attributing this ban to an Indian-American conspiracy designed to stop China's rightful rise.
The reality is, if you are unable to prevent millions of your users from seeing videos of sexualized children you will get in trouble.
I did, no porn or even casual nudity to be found. It’s squeaky clean. Search terms that might return anything like nudity or violence return 0 results and I checked to see if I was in restricted mode or not. It’s the same as Snapchat, just as clean, just as boring.
I have no idea why people would want the government to step in. Forfeiting freedom because it's more convenient than being a hard-ass parent and not letting your child use the app or phone.
The move, by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), comes after the Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay an earlier order by the Madras High Court to ban the app.
So, the government banned the app on highcourt's order
Saved you a click. The rest of the article is fluff.