Nepal decided to ban TikTok because the popular short-video app was disrupting social structures in the South Asian country, government officials say.
Several countries have imposed restrictions on the use of Tiktok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant Bytedance and has more than a billion monthly active users, and India has banned it outright.
“Considering how TikTok is disturbing our social harmony and the impact it is having on our families and social structures, the cabinet has decided to ban TikTok for now,” said Rekha Sharma, Nepal’s minister of communication and information technology, in a press conference on Monday (13).
A CNN attempted to contact TikTok for comment.
On Tuesday (14), Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal defended the decision at an event in the city of Bhaktapur.
“After a long discussion on how to control the tendency to spread disharmony, disorder and chaos in society… a consensus was reached among all political parties, including both the ruling party and the opposition,” he said.
Purushottam Khanal, chairman of the Telecommunications Authority, asked internet service providers to cut off access to the app, the country’s state-run Nepal Television said in a report on Monday.
WorldLink Communications, which calls itself the country’s largest internet service provider, complied with the order and other providers are expected to follow soon, the report added.
Reuters reported, citing local media, that more than 1,600 TikTok-related cybercrime cases have been recorded over the past four years in Nepal, contributing to the “growing demand” for control of the app.
The ban comes more than three years after India blocked Tiktok and several other well-known Chinese apps, saying they posed a “threat to sovereignty and integrity.” At the time, TikTok had around 120 million users in the country, one of the app’s biggest markets.
The United States and its Five Eyes intelligence alliance partners – Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand – have imposed restrictions on the use of TikTok on devices issued to public officials.
In February, the White House told federal agencies they had 30 days to remove TikTok from all government devices. Australia announced in April that the app would have to be removed from federal government devices.
Source: CNN Brasil
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