TikTok has just been banned by Nepal. This small country in the Himalayas, which had already restricted the social network to protect its youth, this time highlights a concern for “social harmony”.
Nepal announced on Monday, November 13, that it had banned TikTok, owned by the Chinese conglomerate ByteDance. After banning all pornographic sites in 2018, the authorities already had this social network in their sights in 2022, annoyed by the behavior of young people filming themselves on sacred sites. The country then imposed restrictions on the use of TikTok in certain monuments.
Many communities
This time, the government estimates, according to the New York Timesthat the refusal of the social network to fight against hateful content night at “social harmony”. Of the “content that fuels religious hatred, violence and [encouragent] sexual abuse” have “led to offline clashes, forcing curfews and police deployment.” This content broadcast on the network has in fact led to online attacks between Hindus, Muslims and certain indigenous communities, regarding the slaughter of cows considered sacred by a large number of Hindus. To preserve its social harmony, Nepal has therefore decided to cut access to the network throughout the country.
Certainly, Nepal, with its 30 million inhabitants, is not going to shake the Chinese giant, which claims a billion users around the world. But TikTok faces a global trend of governments restricting its use. Before Nepal, India banned it along with a dozen other Chinese apps in 2020, after military tensions on its border with China.
The bad image of TikTok in the world
The United States, the European Union and Canada have also placed the social network under surveillance. France asked its officials to erase it, as did the European Commission and the US House of Representatives.
If many suspect the network of letting the Chinese authorities access users’ private data, through access to the microphone and photos of the phones, Nepal has only highlighted this problem of social peace.
The application, which has 2.2 million active users in Nepal, was nevertheless increasingly popular. According to The International Mailhuman rights defenders denounce a pretext for restrict freedom of expression. Taranath Dahal, of the Nepalese NGO Freedom Forum, thinks that the country “moving towards an increasingly tightly controlled society”.