TikTok banned in Pakistan for ‘immoral and indecent content'

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TikTok has been banned in Pakistan over its failure to filter out “immoral and indecent” content, according to the country’s telecommunication authority.

Pakistan becomes just the latest company to take action against the viral video app, which governments from India and Australia to the US have cracked down on. Concerns have ranged from privacy and security concerns about the Chinese owners of the app to the nature of the content being shared.

Officials said that the ban in Pakistan had been undertaken because of the nature of the content being posted on the app.

"In view of number of complaints from different segments of the society against immoral and indecent content on the video sharing application TikTok, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has issued instructions for blocking of the application," it said in a statement.

The PTA said that it had issued a final notice to the company, in view of the “complaints and nature of the content being consistently posted on TikTok”. The government issued a “final warning” to the company in July.

But TikTok and its owner Bytedance had failed to show an “effective mechanism for proactive moderation of unlawful online content”, the authority said, and so the app had been banned.

It is not clear what TikTok content precisely had caused problems for regulators in Pakistan.

TikTok has been told that the authority is “open for engagement”, it said in the same statement, and the decision could still be reviewed.

Reuters reported that the decision was taken after Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, took an interest in the issue. He had instructed the telecoms authority to discourage vulgar content, the news agency reported.