Indian government asks Apple and Google to take down TikTok app | Hacker News Reader

Indian government asks Apple and Google to take down TikTok app

economictimes.indiatimes.com

124 pointsthatssosid61 comments

"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.

I always read the comment section first, for this, actually I'm not going to read the article.

You did great job. Because the Times group in India is known for outrageous advertising and cheap journalism.

TikTok's argument is also relevant:

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.

They probably also have a pretty good nudity filter, considering that all pornography is illegal in China.

Search on youtube "tiktok indian videos". You will probably campaign to make the ban permanent.

I agree

If the videos can be found on YouTube, the problem can't be with TikTok alone, surely.

well those videos aren't exactly the worst of the lot though

Am I going to get put on a list if I search that?

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.

downloaded it to check out the hype, pretty much all under age kids doing borderline stuff.

But no different than Youtube I guess

Google has now blocked Tik Tok in India as a result [0].

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-india-court/google...

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.

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.

I think the ban is not because of defamation.

>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,”

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Delhi-High-Court-banned-PewDie...

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/high-court-orde...

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.

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.)

The channel was not blocked. Just the two videos which were deemed to be defamatory. Pewdiepie can contest the decision.

Two of his videos are not available in India any more.

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/high-court-orde...

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Delhi-High-Court-banned-PewDie...

Less terrible site: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-india-court/indian...

This should be the link in the OP

Christ, that site is probably the worst ad-laden/features promos experience on mobile that I've seen.

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.

Yes, and it breaks the back button too. That is one of my major pet peeves and I immediately add any site that does it to a black hole filter.

No ads for me, thanks to Pi-Hole gods

Turn off Javascript for this site. I use uMatrix, and this site is both usable and ad-free. It's quite pleasant, actually.

Yep. Mindless advertising is huge in India because ad-blockers aren't really mainstream yet.

mirror: https://outline.com/7Fz8wB

It is bad, but I’ve seen one worse: metacritic. That site is hot garbage.

Lol, I clicked the link hoping to read the article, got bombarded with a dozen pops and what not.

Then I was like, "ah Indiatimes, my mistake my mistake. I should have checked the link"

(I'm from India and I avoid Indian media sites like a plague)

Also, yet another site that won't render with javascript enabled. At least I didn't get the dozens of pop ups you encountered.

I made sure to click their fake "allow notifications" modal so that the browser one would pop up and I could click "never allow".

I'll do that next time!

They didn't explain the actual reason until literally the last sentence

That's a fair sample of Indian mainstream media for you. Most of the stuff will be in the headline with some info sprinkled in the article.

Indian media? All media is like that.

The issue has to do more with culture than exposed children. The kulcha warriors are worried about exposure by women.

The same kulcha warriors also decriminalized homosexuality. While your favorite party (read family) was not able to for decades of their rule.

TikTok is one of a couple Chinese apps that have similar disturbing content in India. https://factordaily.com/chinese-app-kwai-turns-a-blind-eye-t...

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.

Clicked link. Saw notification request and Google sign in. Left.

Anyone got a link to an APK that is safe to install?

TikTok is a Chinese application so I wonder if there are other interests at play.

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.

What separates Tik-Tok and other sites which also show millions of sexualized people like Instagram?

There obviously is a reason to be against China in this ban otherwise they'd ban a ton of other apps as well.

Instagram is significantly better at filtering out content featuring minors.

Pornography is outright illegal in China so I imagine TikTok has that part nailed down.

You don't have to imagine, you can use it for 30 minutes yourself, it's wild west.

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.

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.

But why would the government be in in involved in banning apps. Don't we have more important cases pending.

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.

There are certainly apps that should be illegal where the government should step in, right? Unless you're arguing that all apps should be legal?

This is literally at the top of the article:

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

The government banned the app at the directive of the court.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com