Nepal banned TikTok

The government of Nepal banned TikTok this week due to disrupting ‘social harmony’. This is a reaction to latest issues and concerns about personal data at TikTok. Nepal wants to beware their citizens of misuse of their personal data by the social media platform. TikTok is one of the 10 most used social media platforms in 2023 with 1.2 billion users on place 6.

TikTok’s ignorance to demands by the government of Nepal

The government of Nepal has asked all social media platforms to open a liaison office in Nepal, pay taxes and accept the countries laws and regulations. TikTok ignored these requirements. With that the social media platform just lost 2.2 million users since that is the number of TikTok users in Nepal.

The Problems with hate speech and security issues on TikTok

A large Number of Nepalian people complained about hate speech on TikTok. Overall there were more than 1650 cases in which people reported some kind of hate speech. The government of Nepal reported these issues to TikTok but they did not react to these at all. That made the government curious if the platform is good for their citizens. On top of that the social media platform was accused to share personal user data with the government of China. These allegations happened in 2018 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was accused to spy on the pro-democracy protestors in Hong-Kong. This happen through a “backdoor” of TikTok that gave the Chinese government access to activists locations and communications. TikTok denied the accusations though. Yet the incent played a major role in the ban of the social media platform.

Nepal followed a few other countries that have banned TikTok fully or at least for some people or for a particular time. According to Demand Sage India and Afghanistan have fully banned TikTok as well. In the United States and the United Kingdom TikTok is banned from devices of government bodies. Canada, European Union, and Taiwan have restricted access to the app on government issued devices. Pakistan has banned TikTok at least four times. Belgium temporarily banned TikTok from devices owned or paid for by the federal government. And Denmark’s Defense Ministry banned its employees from having TikTok on their work phones. And now Nepal has banned it too.

Due to these factors more and more governments of the world start to question the social media platform. That lead to a serve decrease in sign-up rated of new users.