Chennai: The Madras High Court’s Madurai Bench Wednesday lifted the ban on video mobile application TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, subject to conditions.
Delivering its judgement on a case filed by advocate Muthukumar, the bench vacated its interim order banning the app, subject to conditions that pornographic videos will not be uploaded on it, failing which contempt of court proceedings would begin.
The high court had issued the interim order early this month to the Central government banning the download of the app in India and restricted the media from telecasting videos taken using the app. The order was passed citing the presence of inappropriate and pornographic content on the app.
M Manikandan, the information technology minister of Tamil Nadu, had earlier said the state would write to the Central government seeking a ban on the app in India. The high court appointed leading lawyer Arvind Datar as an independent counsel to the court.
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On an appeal filed by the Chinese company, the Supreme Court, April 22, asked the Madras High Court to decide on TikTok’s plea for interim relief by April 24, failing which the ban imposed on the mobile app will stand lifted. The apex court had refused to pass any order in the matter.
Acting upon instructions from the information technology ministry, Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google had last week removed TikTok from their Indian app stores. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the IT ministry would revoke its instructions to Apple and Google.
TikTok allows users to create and share short videos with special effects and is one of the world’s most popular applications. It has been downloaded by nearly 300 million users so far in India, out of more than 1 billion downloads globally, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower.
The ban worried the social media industry in India as it sees legal worries mounting if courts increasingly regulate content on their platforms.
—agencies