Daily Times

Peshawar High Court lifted the previously imposed ban on the video sharing application, TikTok.

Federal Minister of Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry on Twitter announced that Peshawar High Court has suspended the ban. He further said that future decisions like these must be made carefully so as to not affect Pakistan’s economic future.

After the lifting of ban TikTok issued an official statement, which said:

“We are pleased that TikTok is once again available to our community in Pakistan. This is a testament to TikTok’s continued commitment to enforcing our Community Guidelines to promote a safe and positive community online.

The creativity and passion of this community has brought joy to households across Pakistan and provided a home for incredibly talented creators. TikTok is excited to be able to continue enabling Pakistani voices and creativity as we work to support the success story of Pakistan.

We want to acknowledge Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s support and ongoing productive dialogue, and recognize their care for the digital experience of Pakistani users, which goes a long way to assuring a stable, enabling environment to allow us to explore further investment in Pakistan, and to keep open vital economic opportunities for Pakistani creators through TikTok”

It must be noted that The Peshawar High Court (PHC) ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to ban TikTok – the popular social media platform for entertainment videos – over proliferation of videos ‘spreading obscenity in society’.

PHC Chief Justice Qaiser Rashid Khan gave the order while hearing a petition against the social media platform. PTA Director Kamran Gandapur and deputy attorney generals Amir Javed and Asghar Kundi were also present in court.

Justice Khan said videos being uploaded to TikTok were ‘unacceptable for Pakistani society’. “TikTok is affecting most of the youth. Reports being received about the platform in Peshawar are sad,” he remarked, adding that the videos were ‘spreading obscenity’ and thus the platform should be immediately closed. He questioned whether the closure would hurt the platform, to which Gandapur responded in the affirmative.

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by Chinese company ByteDance. The social media platform is used to make a variety of short-form videos, from genres like dance, comedy, and education, that have a duration from fifteen seconds to one minute (three minutes for some users). TikTok is an international version of Douyin, which was originally released in the Chinese market in September 2016. Later, TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it only became available worldwide after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on August 2, 2018.

It must be noted that TikTok is one of the most widely used apps in Pakistan.