Nepal yesterday (Nov. 13) issued a blanket ban on TikTok, citing hate proliferating on the platform.
Rekha Sharma, Nepal’s minister for communications and information technology, said the decision was made because TikTok has been consistently used to share content that “disturbs social harmony and disrupts family structures and social relations.” Some internet service providers have already cut access, while others will soon, the chairman of the Nepal Telecommunications Authority told Reuters yesterday.
No particular incident was cited as a trigger for the ban, but broadly, the platform was allegedly stoking religious hate, violence, and sexual abuse, which was spilling over offline, too, Nepali officials said. They reached out to TikTok with concerns about troubling content on repeated occasions—including as recently as nine days ago—Narendra K.C., an adviser to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, told The New York Times. But because removing individual videos would be a technologically difficult task, the government settled on a complete ban.
The decision comes days after Nepal introduced a directive requiring social media platforms operating in the country to register with the government, set up local office or appoint a focal person for the country, and be compliant with stringent content moderation rules pertaining to fake news, hate speech, the promotion of sexual exploitation and drugs, terrorism-related messages, and private photos posted without consent.
With the ban, Nepal joins the ranks of India and Afghanistan, who’ve banned the app across devices. In other regions, like the US, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, Norway, and Australia, the ban is levied on some or all government devices, citing national security concerns. TikTok, which is headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, denies sharing any data with the Chinese government, and assures that its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, doesn’t either.
Backlash against Nepal’s TikTok ban
Gagan Thapa, the leader of the opposition party, Nepali Congress, equated the shutdown to curbing freedom of speech in a Facebook post. “If you have a boil on your neck, you don’t chop off your neck,” Bishwa Prakash Sharma, another Nepali Congress member, posted on X. “Identify those who are misusing the platform. But shutting down TikTok is undemocratic.”
It’s not just all political pot-stirring, though. Even digital rights activists sounded alarms over the singling out of TikTok—especially when all platforms were given three months to comply with the new rules.
A joint statement issued by Nepali journalists and civil rights activists says the “untimely and arbitrary” ban “seriously attacks the basic principles of democracy and weakens civil liberties and the rule of law.”
The government’s move will muzzle citizens by stripping them of an “important platform of communication and expression,” and it’ll “adversely affect the economic opportunities of content creators and small and medium enterprises, posing a serious risk to their business stability,” the nearly 30 signatories wrote.
Quotable: TikTok in a democracy
“Social media platforms like TikTok need to recognize the role they play in providing a platform for citizens to voice their opinions, engage in public debate, foster creativity, promote small and medium enterprises and businesses, and provide entertainment. Such digital platforms have been established as the best means of democratic practice in recent days.”
One small number: TikTok’s Nepal user base
2.2 million: TikTok users in Nepal, a sliver of its total billion-plus user base. Nepal’s total population is just 30 million.
Place of interest: India
In June 2021, Indian banned hundreds of Chinese apps following a military standoff between the two countries in the Himalayas that remains unresolved. TikTok was among them.
Several creators, who had millions of followers on the platform, lamented the decision but then diversified and moved on. Instagram Reels has captured most of the creators and audience. Still, no homegrown TikTok copycats have been able to fill the void.