Achi news desk-
TikTok was one of the most popular apps in India – until it was banned in 2020. It is a lesson for what could happen if the US ban goes ahead.
Four years ago, India was TikTok’s biggest market. The app had a growing base of 200 million users, thriving subcultures and sometimes life-changing opportunities for creators and influencers. TikTok seemed unstoppable – until simmering tensions on the India-China border erupted into deadly violence.
After the border skirmish, the Indian government banned the app on 29 June 2020. Almost overnight, TikTok was gone. But Indian TikTok accounts and videos are still online, frozen in time when the app was just emerging as a cultural giant.
In some ways, it could offer a preview of what could be on the horizon in the United States. On April 24, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that could eventually ban TikTok from the United States, marking a new chapter after years of threats and failed legislation. The law requires the company that owns TikTok, Bytedance, to sell its stake in the app within the next nine months, with another three-month grace period, or face a possible ban in the country . Bytedance says it has no intention of selling the social media platform and has vowed to challenge the legislation in court.
Banning a massive social media app would be an unprecedented moment in American tech history, although the current looming court battle leaves TikTok’s fate uncertain. But the Indian experience shows what can happen when a major country wipes TikTok from its citizens’ smartphones. India is not the only country to have taken the step either – in November 2023, Nepal also announced a decision to ban TikTok and Pakistan has implemented a number of temporary bans since 2020. As 150 million US users of the app flow through videos in limbo, the story of TikTok India’s ban shows that users are quick to adapt, but also when TikTok dies, much of its culture dies with it.
Sucharita Tyagi, a film critic from Mumbai, had grown her count to 11,000 followers when TikTok came down, with some of her videos garnering millions of views.
“TikTok was huge. People were coming together across the country, dancing, putting up skits, posting how they run their home in their small town in the hills,” Tyagi said. “There were a huge number of people who suddenly had this revelation and they had always been denied, but now it was possible.”
The app was a special phenomenon because of the ways its algorithm gave opportunities to rural Indian users, who were able to find an audience and even achieve celebrity status not possible on other apps.
“It democratized content response for the first time,” says New Delhi-based tech writer and analyst Prasanto K Roy. “We started to see a lot of these very rural people quite low on the socio-economic ladder that they would never dream of having followers, or making money on it. And the TikTok discovery album would introduce it to users who wanted to see it. There was nothing like it when it came to hyper-local videos.”
TikTok has similar cultural significance in the US, where niche communities thrive and an unknown number of creators and small businesses base their livelihoods around the app. It’s a type of success that is less common on other social media platforms. Instagram, for example, is generally more attuned to using content from accounts with large followings, while TikTok places a heavier emphasis on encouraging regular users to post.
When TikTok went offline in India, the government banned 58 other Chinese apps along with it, including some that are growing in popularity in the US today, such as the fashion shopping app Shein. As the years progressed, India banned over a hundred more Chinese apps, although negotiations recently brought an Indian version of Shein back online.
The same thing could happen in the United States. The new law sets a precedent and creates a mechanism for the American government to remove other Chinese apps. The privacy and national security concerns politicians voice about TikTok could apply to a host of other companies as well.
And when a popular app is removed, others can try to fill the gap. “As soon as TikTok was banned it opened up a multi-billion dollar opportunity,” said Nikhil Pahwa, an Indian technology policy analyst and founder of the news site MediaNama. “Several Indian startups launched or were launched to fill the gap.”
For months, the Indian tech press was flooded with news of these vibrant new Indian social media companies, with the names Chingari, Moj and MX Taka Tak. Some had initial success, attracting former TikTok stars onto their platforms and securing investments and even government support. India’s social market split into different corners as the new apps battled for supremacy, but that post-TikTok gold rush didn’t last long.
In August 2020, Instagram launched a short-form video feed called Reels, a few months after TikTok’s ban. YouTube followed suit with Shorts, its own TikTok copycat feature, a month later. Instagram and YouTube were already entrenched in India, and there was no chance in the startup field.
“There was a lot of buzz about alternatives to TikTok, but most faded in the long run,” said Prateek Waghre, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian advocacy group. “In the end, Instagram was probably the one that benefited the most.”
For many of the more Indian TikTok creators and their fans, it wasn’t long before they moved to the Meta and Google apps, and many found similar success.
For example, Geet, an Indian social media influencer who only goes by her first name, rose to full-fledged fame on TikTok teaching “American English” and giving life advice and pep talks. She had 10 million followers across three accounts by the time TikTok was banned.
In an interview with the BBC in 2020, Geet shared concerns about the future of her career. But four years later, she has amassed nearly five million followers across Instagram and YouTube.
However, users and experts the BBC spoke to say something has been lost in the post-TikTok transition. Instagram and YouTube may have captured TikTok’s traffic, but the apps didn’t recreate the Indian feel of TikTok.
“TikTok was a relatively different kind of user base in terms of the creators,” Pahwa said. “You had farmers, and bricklayers, and people from small towns uploading videos on TikTok. One doesn’t see that so much on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. TikTok’s discovery mechanism was very different. “
If TikTok is banned in the US, the American social media landscape may follow a similar path to India’s. Four years after the ban, Instagram and YouTube have already established themselves as the home for short videos. Even LinkedIn is experimenting with a TikTok-like video feed.
The app’s competitors have proven that they don’t need to recreate TikTok’s culture to find success. It is possible, if not likely, that America’s hyper-local and niche content would disappear, just as it did in India. In fact, the cultural implications on the United States would be much more significant. Nearly a third of Americans aged 18 to 29 get their news from TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center.
The US has fewer TikTok users than India’s 200 million at its peak, but India is home to 1.4 billion people. TikTok reportedly has 170 million users in the US, more than half of the country’s population.
“When India banned TikTok, the app wasn’t the behemoth it is now,” Tyagi said. “It has turned into a cultural revolution over the last few years. I think banning it now in America would have a much bigger impact.”
What is already different is TikTok’s response. The company has vowed a legal battle over the US government’s new law, a battle that could wind its way up to the US Supreme Court. TikTok could have launched a similar legal challenge to India’s ban, but chose not to.
“Chinese companies have good reason to be hesitant to go to the courts in India against the Indian government,” Roy said. “I don’t think they would find them very sympathetic.”
India’s ban was also immediate, taking effect in a few weeks. TikTok’s impending legal challenge in the US could tie up the law for years, and there’s no guarantee the legislation will withstand a battle in the courts.
There is also a much greater chance that the US TikTok ban would spark a trade war. “I think there is a clear possibility of reciprocity from China,” Pahwa said. China condemned India for banning TikTok, but there was no apparent retaliation. The United States may not be so lucky.
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There are several reasons for China’s response to India’s ban. One is the fact that the Indian technology industry is effectively non-existent in China. The American technology industry, on the other hand, offers plenty of opportunities for a two-pronged attack. China has already launched an effort to “remove America” and replace US technology with domestic alternatives. A TikTok ban could increase that project.
“The TikTok ban was so sudden when it happened,” Tyagi said. “For me it wasn’t that big, I was using the app to promote my other work. But it felt weird and unfair to a lot of people, especially people who were actually making money and getting brand deals.” The loss of TikTok didn’t affect Tyagi’s livelihood, but it cut her off from her account. That is, until she went on a trip to the United States.
“When I visited America and I was surprised to see my profile still active,” said Tyagi. It was like a trip back in time. She even posted a few videos. Of course, most of her followers at home couldn’t see them, but she got some engagement from Indians living abroad.
“These millions of accounts are still there,” Tyagi said. “It’s interesting to see that TikTok is keeping them. I wonder if they hope India will let them come back. “
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