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KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Nepal’s government decided to ban the popular social media app TikTok on Monday, saying it was disrupting “social harmony” in the country.
Foreign Minister Narayan Prakash Saud said the app would be banned immediately.
He said that to make social media platforms accountable, the government has asked the companies to register and open a liaison office in Nepal, pay taxes and abide by the country’s laws and regulations.
It wasn’t clear what triggered the ban or if TikTok had refused to comply with Nepal’s requests.
TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, has faced scrutiny in a number of countries because of concerns that Beijing could use the app to harvest user data or advance its interests.
Countries including the United States, Britain and New Zealand have banned the app on government phones despite TikTok repeatedly denying that it has ever shared data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked.
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Can’t say they’re particularly wrong but I feel like this is going at it the wrong way. It’s not like TikTok is particularly problematic, it’s just that the platform is so massively popular the general problem with big tech social media has become so big it can’t be ignored anymore.
(for profit) Social media has an inherent interest in fostering an unhealthy environment because angry people tend to argue with the people they’re angry at more so than people agreeing or politely disagreeing with each other. It’s no wonder everyone is shouting at each other when the media everyone is doing the shouting on have a vested interest in making sure that the shouting be as loud as possible.
Non-profit social media isn’t exactly healthy either.
I know beehaw is a relative safe haven, but venture to other instances in the fediverse and you’ll find cesspits of toxicity that are as bad as it gets.
And given what my experiences with toxic positivity, cancelling and culture wars in minority run communities which should know better, I doubt beehaw doesn’t have its fair share of toxicity too. Even if you manage to keep out the worst bigots, people who have been hurt or bullied, quite often end up hurting or bullying others.
L’enfer c’est les autres.
I mean that’s fair enough, I’m not arguing Big Tech is solely to blame. Heck before big Social Media was a thing you still had your forum trolls trying to make everyone else’s life as miserable as possible, among other infamous archetypes of insufferabiltiy. But I think (I have no data on this) that the environments found in the Fediverse are, on average, healthier than what you find on Big Tech platforms.
Whether that’s down to fewer people using the Fediverse or the approach being better I cannot back with data. It’s just a gut feeling that the entire structure is more geared toward facilitating a healthy community (let’s ignore lemmy’s absolute lack of moderation tools here for a second)
I mean, they’re not wrong. But it’s not tiktok, it’s almost all social media and consequently, 99% of the internet.
It’s the advertising model of funding. (IMO)
China seems to be waging a influence war against Nepal, so I wouldent be that surprised if Tiktok was used as a weapon there.
They’re doing it in every country really.
Good opportunity for Nepali entrepreneurs to make a Nepali clone. Does one already exist?
Nepal has banned all pornographic sites in 2018.
Hahahahaha, no. I was in Nepal and definitely watched porn. The censor must have been terrible because I didn’t even know it existed.
So, yeah, tiktok won’t be banned then.
nepal never watched siegfried and joy
Nepal is the future
The problem is not TikTok, it’s people who are easily influenced and distracted by sensationalist content. I will tell you that TikTok is nothing but vocal and instrumental entertainment with some stand-up comedy and British sit-com style clips, but that’s because I don’t follow or wander off into political discourse or “news” areas.
It varies from region to region. The problem with TikTok is that, the western version seems to have very different content / moderation than other parts of the world.
I’m in south east asia, the amount of homophobic content that’s tied up with anti-semitism (accusing jewish people of pushing LBGTQ+ propaganda) is nauseating. I’ve reported so many of those posts, plus the typical ‘here are media companies, and Israeli flags on them’ or ‘the Austrian painter was right / didn’t finish their job’ posts, but they always come back as ‘No Violations’.
It’s frustrating, because the US / European versions are very progressive, but for the other parts of the world, it’s being pushed towards far right extremism.
You do realize you’re getting fed that content because you interact with it, right? I get the odd run of uninteresting content, too; I don’t interact with it because it’s not what I want to watch.
Nope, I don’t interact with them outside reporting them.
I disagree. Platforms like Tiktok take advantage of very specific psychological tricks to lure people’s attention in and keep it where they want it. It’s not the audience’s fault when they don’t notice a magician perform a sleight of hand during a trick. It’s not a victims fault when a thief does the same for ill. I do believe regulation might need to get involved if these platforms are doing harm. The same happened in the gaming space with lootboxes when regulators realized they were essentially marketing gambling to minors. It’s not the minors fault in that case either.
Every for-profit platform does this. Every product package on the shelf does this. It works because someone always finds a way around the prohibition, and we are shirking it responsibility of teaching others-everyone- how to identify it. Magic tricks don’t become uninteresting by making them illegal, they become uninteresting by telling everyone how they work.
Oh yes, education should definitely be a part of the solution.
