TikTok, the popular Chinese short video app, is taking steps to appease the concerns that the Indian government has raised around the content and the privacy policy of the app. The app is hugely popular between teenagers and a large number of Indian teenagers are an avid user of the app.
The company recently came in talks with lobbyist Sandhya Sharma from Mastercard India to drive its government policy and initiatives here. The company is also looking to appoint a grievance officer.
The government of India recently proposed some regulations that have caused a cacophony among social media platforms in India and TikTok, which has an estimated 500 million users 39 percent of which are from India, is bound to get affected by it.
TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, started an online campaign in India on Tuesday in partnership with the Cyber Peace Foundation to promote online safety. The company has roped in social media celebrities such as Arjun Kanungo, Shirley Setia and Neha Kakkar on TikTok to talk about reporting hate speech and sexually explicit content, maintaining privacy online and avoid doing dangerous stunts to shoot videos.
The content that goes viral on TikTok and its counterparts are often close to sexually explicit content and often end up exposing children to nudity and possibly those who seek to coerce underage users into committing explicit contents.
“At TikTok, we are committed to maintaining a safe and positive in-app environment for our users to showcase their creativity and talent. TikTok in no way endorses or promotes content that is in violation of our community guidelines,” Public Policy Director Sharma said, as reported by ET.
TikTok has a set of templates and visual effects that users can use to lip-sync or dance in short video skits. There is also a live streaming feature that lets users send virtual gifts to their favorite creators on the platforms. The rest of the app works pretty much like any other social media–followers, hashtags, likes, and comments.
TikTok has expanded its territory substantially outside of China and India has emerged as its biggest foreign market. According to Sensor Tower, a market analysis firm, India accounts for up to 27 percent of the new TikTok installs between December 2017 and 2018, in this period India saw download of the app to increase nearly 25 times, from 1.3 million to 32.3 million.
TikTok has said that in order to ensure user safety the company has combined technology with a robust content moderation team covering major regional languages in India. The company’s moderation team, which is based on 20 countries and regions, has seen a 5 times growth since last year. In India, it covers languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Gujarati.
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