TikTok Ban: Govt Has Asked Apple & Google To Remove TikTok App From Their App Store

Earlier this month, the Madras High Court directed the central government to ban the app TikTok, claiming it "encourages pornography".

Now it seems the Supreme Court has refused to put a stay on the order, so the app is officially expected to be taken offline.

An SC bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi posted the matter for an April 22 hearing as it will be heard in Madras High Court today. In the meantime, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) has asked both Apple and Google to take the app down from their platforms.

TikTok has been all the rage lately, both across the world and in India. Of its approximately half a billion users, at least 119 million are estimated to be Indian. And those are all mostly kids and teenagers.

At its core, TikTok is an app that lets you share short videos. The idea is to use dance or lip sync to background music or movie dialogues to create the most viral clip. Lately though, the app has faced backlash for exposing younger audiences to sleazy content and being "inappropriate".

Mostly though, because of the unusually high number of older men on the app in India, it's been accused of being an idyllic breeding ground for pedophiles. But whether or not a ban would even fix this problem is a different question entirely, one we've written about before.

For its part, TikTok doesn't agree with the accusations or the ban, calling it "disproportionate, discriminatory and arbitrary." Without really accepting blame for the controversy, the company says it's been working on stepping up its content filters and moderation, and has removed "over 6 million videos that violated the ToS in India."