Representative image
| Photo Credit: Reuters
TikTok, the popular short-video app, was just about to face a shut down in the U.S. after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the app to be sold by its Chinese parent company ByteDance or banned on Sunday (January 19, 2025) in the United States on national security grounds but Donald Trump came to the rescue, giving them more time to find an approved buyer before the popular video-sharing platform is subject to a permanent U.S. ban.
It is not the first time that China based TikTok app is facing a ban in a country on national security grounds. Five years ago in June 2020, the Government of India banned 59 applications, most of them popular Chinese applications, and TikTok was one among them, along with Shareit, Mi Video Call, Club Factory and Cam Scanner, citing threat to national security and sovereignty.
The ban was the result of continuing tensions on the border between India and China and covers a variety of applications from e-commerce to gaming, social media, browsers, instant messaging and file sharing.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) had said in statement cited that these apps were engaged in “activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.”
The IT Ministry said it received many complaints, including misuse of mobile apps for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorised manner to servers which have locations outside India. The IT Ministry also alleged that data mining and profiling was happening through TikTok and other China based apps by elements hostile to national security and defence of India.
Published – January 20, 2025 10:35 am IST
