Pakistan’s telecom regulator announced on Monday that it would lift the ban on the popular video-sharing app TikTok. The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) said in a statement that the decision was made after TikTok management assured the PTA that it will block all accounts “involved in spreading obscenities and immorality” in the country.
The Pakistani telecommunications agency’s decision came more than a week after it blocked the Chinese video-sharing platform for “immoral and indecent” content.
TikTok, owned by ByteDance, later said in a statement that it was pleased to see the app unlocked for users in Pakistan. “We appreciate the PTA’s commitment to ongoing productive dialogue and acknowledge its care for the digital experience of Pakistani users,” he said.
The move was very well received in Pakistan, where several people have become stars overnight due to the content they produced and the followers they amassed.
Pakistan is TikTok’s twelfth largest market and analysts say the app’s popularity grew phenomenally in the country this year during the prolonged coronavirus-related lockdown.
The video-sharing app has been downloaded nearly 43 million times in Pakistan, including 14.7 million this year alone, according to data from research firm SensorTower.
Amid the growing popularity of TikTok in Pakistan, there have been complaints about some of the content that is shared on the platform. The company’s transparency report shows that it has removed nearly 6.5 million videos between January and June, the third highest for any country after India and the United States.
The report also shows that the Pakistani government had reported 40 accounts to TikTok for content with which it disagreed, but only two of those accounts were removed or restricted by the app.
Pakistan closely monitors online content and has implemented a regulation calling on digital platforms to remove content that the government finds objectionable.
In September, the government said it blocked access to dating apps Tinder, Tagged, Skout, Grindr and SayHi for what it called “immoral and indecent content.” The government had also blocked YouTube from 2012 to 2016, reportedly for blasphemous content that the platform had not removed at the time.
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