Pakistan has blocked the Bigo Live streaming app and issued a “final warning” to ByteDance’s TikTok over “immoral, obscene, and vulgar content” on the apps.
The nation’s telecom authority said it had received a number of complaints from various segments of society over the nature of videos that circulate on Bigo and ByteDance’s app and how it is impacting “society in general and youth in particular.”
Pakistan Telecommunications Authority said in a statement that it recently relayed those concerns to ByteDance and Bigo Technologies, which operates the Bigo app, and urged it to proactively “moderate the socialization and content within legal and moral limits.” But the response from these apps hasn’t been satisfactory, it said.
“Therefore, in exercise of its powers under PECA (nation’s Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act), PTA has decided to immediately block Bigo and issue final warning to TikTok to put in place a comprehensive mechanism to control obscenity, vulgarity, and immorality through its social media application.”
According to mobile insights firm Sensor Tower, TikTok was the most downloaded app in Pakistan, which has about 40 million internet users, last year.
Pakistan also placed a temporary ban on popular mobile game PUBG earlier this week over concerns that youth in the nation were “wasting their time” on the “addictive” app.
Earlier this year, Pakistan’s government unveiled some of the world’s most sweeping rules on internet censorship that would have severely impacted American tech firms operating in the nation. But it later retreated the rules after Facebook, Google and Twitter among other firms, threatened to leave the nation.
Leave a Reply