TikTok is the social media platform that blew the world by storm in the pandemic era. It was so big, anyone with a phone pretty much had the app and spent a few hours a day using it. However, the app posed some complications, which lead countries to decide whether to ban the sensational app as it was causing more harm than good. Here’s why.
It wastes people’s time
When I was younger, I used to use TikTok like it was nothing. It would make 4 hours feel like 10 minutes. Honestly, it was quite bad and decided to quit using it. Unfortunately, I was not the only culprit that was succumbed to this addiction. It affected others so badly to the point that they would spend at least 8 hours a day on TikTok. So, Governments around the world are trying to stop people like me from wasting time just scrolling through entertainment. They believe that the public could spend more time working on more practical things rather than spending time scrolling and watching random clips.
It is not appropriate
Now continuing onto the next reason why countries are banning TikTok is that it is not very age-appropriate. It exposes various mature content to our younger generations such as Toxic masculinity/femininity, sexual predators, hates speech and cyberbullying. These take a toll on children’s health in which they could experience, anxiety and depression. Think about it, do you want your child to be viewing clips of racism, sexism stuff like that all time? It can change them. The app also acts as a “Brainwashing mechanism” since people will just believe all the content exposed and just follow it. Imagine if all children watched those videos, it could drastically change their future.
Lease of misinformation
Speaking of drastically changing the future, imagine if all the content you heard on TikTok is fake, that would be crazy, although it is actually kind of true. Now, this was a big issue back in 2020. During Covid times, there was a large bust of false information regarding covid vaccines, especially from uninformed doctors and everyday people. Which was quite surprising since most of the covid content came from doctors.
According to the organisation, NYU school of global public health believes that using the internet is both “a benefit and a barrier to getting the right information”. Dr Siyab Panhwar a Cardiologist mentioned in the article stated that “You used to defer to people who know more than you. But that doesn’t happen on social media — everyone’s an expert”. Although, at times, people can certainly find credible videos that provide truthful information, however, majority of the time they ain’t.
Censorship and free of speech
TikTok does have a censorship system however it is not very consistent. Meaning that it has censorship system but it is not effective enough to remove harmful and inappropriate content. There is evidence that Bytedance (a chinese organisation that currently owns TikTok) reportedly controlled clips of LGBTQ+ and black lives matter TikToks to be viewed less on TikTok. This means Bytedance has the power to control watch you watch!
They also can control whatever users have to say (but it depends). If it is something within their protocols they will allow it vice versa. Thus Governments believe that all humans have the right to say and have the what the want to watch.
Bytedance can see all your information
However, all those freedom of speech clips can technically be stolen due to the data breach. Bytedance the organisation has supposedly breached users’ data which can be accessed by Chinese Governments. This is why most Countries like Pakistan, Taiwan and India have currently banned the app on Government devices. However, other countries such as Australia placed privacy restrictions against China for Government officials and military personnel. So for those who do live in TikTok legal countries and have done thousands of dance moves, just know that there is someone that has kept all your dance moves and has studied/researched them (Just joking but for those who work in the Government industry, watch out).