Islamabad, Oct. 18 (IANS): After Pakistani authorities imposed a complete ban on short video-making app TikTok, the Chinese service has regretted Islamabad’s decision, hinting towards a reallocation of its resources if authorities unblock it.
In a statement, TikTok expressed sadness over its Pakistani users for not being able to access the app for over a week now.
“This is why we’re sad that our users and creators in Pakistan are still unable to access TikTok more than one week after our service were blocked by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA),” ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, said in a statement.
“TikTok’s mission is to inspire creativity and joy, and that’s just what we’ve done in Pakistan. We’ve built a community whose creativity and passion has brought joy to households across Pakistan and opened vital economic opportunities to incredibly talented creators,” the statement added.
TikTok maintained that it has made concerted efforts to address concerns and reservations of Pakistani authorities, which have blocked the social networking service for what they claimed as promoting indecent content.
“Over the past year, we’ve made concerted efforts to address questions from the government of Pakistan around our content moderation process, including significantly increasing the capacity of our local language content moderation team”, the statement said.
“After TikTok was blocked in Pakistan, we continued to engage with the PTA to demonstrate our commitment to comply with local laws and further enhance our content moderation capacity,” the statement added.
However, ByteDance regretted that despite their extended efforts and coordination with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), which “acknowledged and appreciated these efforts”, TikTok remains banned in Pakistan while no communication has been done by the Pakistani authorities to the company till date.
“We continue to hope that our productive dialogue with the PTA can bring assurance of the government’s commitment to a stable, enabling environment whereby we can explore investing further in the market, including in the inspiring talent we’ve seen thrive on TikTok.
“If the government of Pakistan decides to reopen access to our services in the future, we can assess our allocation of resources to this market,” the company said.
The popular platform allows users to create short music, lip-sync, dance, comedy and talent videos of 3 to 15 seconds, along with short looping videos of three to 60 seconds.
The platform has been immensely popular in Pakistan with young talents expressing themselves through different videos. However, Pakistani authorities imposed a ban on the platform, stating that TikTok has been promoting indecent and vulgar content, which cannot be allowed to spread in the country.
