The Indian government has announced a ban on 59 different Chinese apps, including TikTok. There's a wide range of factors that may have contributed, but the country has released an official statement on the matter as well.
India and TikTok have had their share of drama in 2020, and it's not just the country's government that seems to have a problem with the app. Some of the most prominent Indian TikTok users have posted viral videos that either encourage or make light of domestic violence against women. One of the biggest incidents came in the fallout of a video from TikTok star Faizal Siddiqui that joked about the trend of throwing acid on women who reject men. The platform's reluctance to ban the video and its creator until public outcry reached a fever pitch sparked the Twitter hashtag #TikTokExposed, and demands from many Indian citizens and government officials to have the app banned.
Now that the app is actually banned, the government of India's given reason doesn't specifically highlight any of the concerns from the #TikTokExposed campaign. Instead, per a story on Tech Crunch, the country cites issues with these apps functioning as malware that mines data from users and puts private information at risk. A press release about the ban from the Indian Ministry of Information Technology explains that it receives complaints from multiple sources about these apps "stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India." The document reiterates that this is a move intended to "ensure safety and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace" multiple times.
What Being Banned in India Means for TikTok
It's hard to pin down how much truth there is in the Indian government's explanation here. On one hand, India is far from the first country to take issue with the potential security threats of TikTok's connection with China. On the other, the aforementioned issues between the country and TikTok already resulted in a ban earlier this year. That ban, issued by the same Ministry of IT as this one, was given with the stated reason that the app promoted "illicit activity". That ban was reversed in Indian courts less than a month later, but not before TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, filed a lawsuit saying the ban cost it hundreds of millions of dollars and put jobs at risk. So, it's possible some of this is part of a political "tit-for-tat". All of this exists outside of the recent military conflicts between China and India.
Regardless of the reason, the ban hurts TikTok. Details on how the ban even works are scarce – the previous one only stopped new users from downloading the app – and neither Google nor Apple has removed TikTok from any storefronts. However, the Tech Crunch story mentions that 27 of the 59 banned apps rank in Android's top 1,000 for last month, and losing access to these apps would affect one in three Indian smartphone users. If the previous two-week ban was significant enough that TikTok filed a lawsuit, over the losses it induced, one can only imagine how this one, assuming it's more severe, will impact the company.
Source: Tech Crunch, Indian Ministry of Information Technology