The Taliban has announced that popular short video platform TikTok and PUBG would be banned in Afghanistan soon. The popular battle royale game as well as TikTok would be banned in the country in 90 days. The Taliban has said that PUBG and TikTok should be banned in Afghanistan because these apps promote violence, the media has reported.
The ban that the Taliban wants to impose on PUBG and TikTok was communicated by the country's Ministry of Telecommunication. The decision to blacklist the apps comes after the telecom ministry held a meeting with the security sector and the Sharia Law enforcement administration.
According to a report by Afghan news source Khaama Press, the Taliban would impose the ban on TikTok within a month, but the ban on PUBG Mobile could take up to 90 days to come into effect.
This is not the first time that such apps have been banned by a country. Earlier in 2020, India banned several Chinese apps and a total of more than 270 apps have been banned since then. Earlier in February, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) formally issued a notification banning the operations of 54 Chinese apps in India, as several of such apps from the stable of Chinese companies like Tencent and Alibaba, changed hands to hide ownership.
The 54+ Chinese apps that were banned included Tencent Xriver, Nice Video Baidu and Viva Video Editor, over security and privacy concerns. According to news agency PTI, these 54 apps allegedly obtain various critical permissions and collect sensitive user data. The collected real-time data are being misused and transmitted to servers located in a hostile country.
Meanwhile, according to a patent filed by TikTok parent ByteDance with the US Trademark Office for “TikTok Music" in May, the company may be working to introduce a music discovery app. As per the filing by ByteDance, the service would let users purchase, play, share, and download music, similar to what music streaming giant Spotify does.
TikTok's parent firm has some experience already with music streaming platforms as two years back, ByteDance launched a music streaming app named Resso in some countries that including India and Brazil.