KOCHI: Maneka Sanjay Gandhi, an animal activist, and politician took to Twitter to express her dismay after the head of TikTok India refused to take down the videos that showed violence towards animals and instead asked people to appeal to the users to not post such content. She shared images of her response where she urged that the video sharing network take a firmer commitment immediately. In her statement to the network head, she said that they must put penalties and stop such content. She went on to add that it seems to be their goal to increase users at the cost of violence against animals, children, and women while also spreading fake news.
Tiktok immediately reverted and announced that they have removed all videos that depicted violence and shared the relevant details with law enforcement agencies. This comes in after #bantiktokindia started trending on Twitter last week and the outraged public tweeted about how it encouraged violence. All of this is a continuation of the infamous YouTube vs Tiktok war on social media that led to a series of such events unfolding in the last two weeks.
Ajey Nagar popularly known as Carry Minati, a 20-year old well-known YouTuber roasted a Tiktok star Amir Siddiqui, who earlier posted a video about YouTubers and how the Tiktokers were better content creators than them. This did not go well with Carry who made a video, roasting the Tiktok star, and wanted to put an end to the so-called YouTube vs Tiktok war.
Amir later took down his IGTV video and apologised asking everyone not to spread hate between supporters of YouTube and Tiktok. However, things took a turn when Amir and other Tiktok users reported Carry of cyberbullying in his YouTube video. This led to YouTube taking down Carry’s video that would have broken the record of being the first 10 million liked non-musical video.
Carry, in an Instagram IGTV mentioned that his statements and dialogues in the video against Amir was taken out of context. He went on to add that his slangs and humour in Hindi were translated to English leading to the wrong representation of what he wanted to convey in response to Amir Siddiqui’s comments on Youtubers. Carry added that the assumptions by people were passed on as facts and is clueless as to what statements were the reason for the taking down of his video that had already broken several records.
This ought to be an end of the war, but Carry’s fans and other YouTube users immediately trended on Twitter with #bringbackcarryminatiyoutubevideo. Now the issue wasn’t yet settled when Faizal Siddiqui, brother of Amir was picked for promoting acid attack. His videos were circulated on social media and alleged that they promoted abuse and violence on women.
Faizal released a statement saying that he did not promote acid attack and just a part of the video he posted was used. However, TikTok eventually took down his account because of the various complaints. By then a lot of people had found many other videos on TikTok that promoted violence against women, religions, and animals as well.
Not just Maneka, but many others like actress Pooja Bhatt also tweeted about the video of Faizal: “What on earth is wrong with people? This is depraved. How can you allow this kind of content on your platform @TikTok_IN? This man needs to be taken to task. As for the woman in the video – Do you realise what immense harm you are causing by participating in this?” (sic)Chairperson of National Commission for Women Rekha Sharma tweeted in response to a tweet, “Written to Maharashtra DGP to take action against #FaizalSiddiqui. Also wrote to @TikTok_IN to block this person from the platform, though they have deleted the video from it after a call from NCW India.”
Many netizens have been trending a variety of hashtags to ban the Chinese app such as #BanTikTokInIndia and #Indiansagainsttiktok. One such user Palki Sharma, tweeted: “TikTok censors posts in India that mention China or Tibet, but allows violent content including videos that glorify acid attacks. It’s like hidden medicine – Chinese propaganda amid tons of ‘fun’ videos. #BanTikTokInIndia.” (sic) However, TikTok lost its rating on Google play store from 4.2 to 1.6. A video from one of its users seems to have cost TikTok a lot.