TikTok's lesson

TikTok, a video-sharing platform and the latest social media sensation to scorch the internet

Here’s a confession: Before April 3 this year, I had no idea that “TikTok” meant anything other than the sound made by clocks. Even that awareness was at a dimly remembered level, because it’s been ages since we’ve had a big-face clock at home that tick-tocked throughout the day. Well, my lamentable ignorance is now a thing of the past. The moment the Madras High Court banned it earlier this month, I realised that “TikTok” was, in fact, a video-sharing platform and the latest social media sensation to scorch the internet.

Since then, my familiarity with TikTok has deepened. Some folks on my college WhatsApp group have been posting TikTok videos by people — frisky teens, slick-haired youths, nightie-clad women, lungi-draped men — who had had the urge to inflict their dance moves on the world while they lip-synced to their choice of thumping music. I’m not going to describe these videos for fear of being charged with lookism, body-shaming, cultural sniffiness and so on. Let’s just say that my former classmates and I found them hilarious and we hit the ROFL emoji rather a lot to register our mirth. (Since we are of the same vintage, ie, an era prior to these politically correct times, we did not lecture each other on the awfulness of laughing at people who were exercising their right to express and exhibit themselves.) 

TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, has tens of millions of videos and memes on its app. And they are of a staggering variety. Some are fun, some are silly or quirky, while others are ludicrous or sleazy or even downright offensive. The question is, should the aesthetic, cultural and moral notions of a person or a group be reason enough to clamp down on a hugely popular social media app which has 54 million monthly active users in India, 500 million such worldwide and as of October 2018, has been installed 800 million times globally? 

The Madras High Court’s interim ban on TikTok was based on a PIL which said that it encouraged pornography and led to the cultural degradation of children and the youth. On Wednesday, the Madurai bench of the high court lifted the ban — a welcome move, since the ban was arbitrary and a violation of the freedom of expression of lakhs of users. Yes, every effort should be made to eliminate child pornography and protect children from sexual predators roaming online. And TikTok probably needs to beef up its firewalls in this regard — in February this year, it agreed to pay $5.7 million to authorities in the US to settle charges that it had illegally collected private information on children. But must we throw out the baby with the bathwater? Must we make parts of the digital space inaccessible to everyone as a result? 

Experts say that the next level of internet adoption in India will be driven by video. It will be driven by neo-literates and post-literates who are more comfortable communicating through videos than through text. What if a home-grown video-sharing app becomes as cool as TikTok in the eyes of the young (and the young-at-heart)? Will we see the same consternation over its cultural impact and the same desire to stamp it out? Or is the outrage over TikTok, a Chinese product, driven as much by moral panic as it is by an element of protectionism? 

This creeping protectionism has been manifest in recent months. On December 26, 2018, a ministry of commerce notification disrupted business for Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart by outlawing their largest sellers and own-brand products on their platforms. (Coincidentally, a couple of weeks later, Mukesh Ambani announced his plans to enter e-commerce.) The draft e-commerce policy went further and turned out to be more about data nationalism than about e-commerce. 

One has to wait and see if this trend will gain momentum and affect other foreign online properties once a new government takes over at the Centre. Meanwhile, let’s try to shield our children from the menaces that lurk online. But let’s cut out the obsession with their so-called “cultural degradation” because of this or that thing. Every generation bemoans the habits of its young. Civilisation progresses nonetheless.

Shuma Raha is a journalist and author based in Delhi @ShumaRaha