TIKTOK BAN IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN:
TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based Internet techonology company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. It is used to create short music, lip-synce, dance , comedy and talent videos of 3 to 15 seconds, and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China. However, it only became available worldwide, including the United States, after merging with another Chinese social media service Musical.ly in 2018. TikTok has been downloaded more than 80 million times in the United States, and has reached 2 billion downloads worldwide.
TikTok was banned completely in India by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on 29 June 2020, with a statement saying there were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order”. There was a lot of controversies that took place when the ban of TikTok happened. This app was banned because the audience – mainly people from the age of 16-25 – have been strongly addicted to this video-sharing app. Sources say that an 16-year old TikTok star from India dies from committing suicide and nobody knew the reason why. This happened just after Sushant Singh Rajput; a famous Bollywood Actor committed suicide. Mental Health has become more and more important after the demise of this 16 year-old as a lot of suicides took place in the pandemic.
On 9 October 2020, Pakistan blocked TikTok for failing to filter out “immoral and indecent” content. Here is a major Rhetorical question – why would people want to make videos of themselves and others that would make their life miserable? There were a lot of addiction concerns, content concerns, misinformation, content censorship, privacy concerns, cyberbullying due to these videos, and so on.
Talking about how writers conveyed this information is important to know; which tone they used and how explicit/implicit was the information. All three of the appeals are used in this text to show how the author described the situation. First, Ethos – is about establishing your authority to speak on the subject – the writer was explicitly assessing the situation about the ban of TikTok and how that impacted the audience. Second, Logos – is your logical argument for your point – how the ban of TikTok was made with logical reasons like privacy reasons, content concerns and misinformation. Lastly, Pathos – is your attempt to sway an audience emotionally – there were alot of people who died and suffered from depression due to the ban of TikTok.