India Banned TikTok, It Didn’t Go Well

We know that a lot of politicians (and media folks) in the US are pushing to ban TikTok. It has seemed notable, of course, that European countries don’t seem all that worried about TikTok, which should raise questions about how serious the “threat” really is. However, one major country did decide to ban TikTok a few years ago: India.

Of course, it was less about the threats TikTok posed directly (even though the Indian government pretended otherwise), and more about retaliation for the border dispute between India and China.

That said, we now have a few years of evidence as to how that’s worked out in India. In the last couple of days, both the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times have published articles looking at what happened when India banned TikTok. In both cases, it’s a mixed bag, but it didn’t work out as well as the government liked, generally helping big American companies and pissing off lots of young people.

But, let’s start by going further back. Last year, the wonderful site Rest of World published their own article on this question. They found that the only “winners” from a ban were basically the biggest American companies: Meta and Google. This is because both Instagram and YouTube got a big boost in traffic from people who formerly used TikTok in India.

As for those who lost out: people who had built up a large following on TikTok found it hard to replicate elsewhere. Also, a flood of local Indian startups and investors rushed into the void to try to create their own TikToks, only to find that it was tougher than they expected (especially with Instagram and YouTube offering such a large audience already):

Some venture capitalists in India tried to capitalize on the ban with their own competitors — but building a TikTok replacement proved harder than it looked. A little more than four months after the ban, at least 13 TikTok short-form video startups emerged — but today, only three of those apps are significant players: Moj, Josh, and Glance. They’ve raised significant funding and seen their valuations rise but struggled to fight the dominance of Reels and Shorts.

“Whatever hopes we had, they were proven wrong. We have not achieved the kind of numbers that we hoped for,” says Lunia, whose firm is a backer of Moj’s parent company. “Meta and Google have extracted their pound of flesh from these other [short-video apps] who want to get app downloads.”

So, given the concerns that many people have already expressed that Google and Meta are already too big, it seems like a weird move for those same politicians to help those companies out by kneecapping TikTok. Of course, this also explains why Meta hired political tricksters to plant stories about the supposed dangers of TikTok. Meta knows that it would stand to benefit a ton from a TikTok ban.

As the more recent NY Times article highlights, there was a real negative impact for Indian creators, even those who moved over to the big American platforms:

India’s online life soon adapted to TikTok’s absence. Meta’s Instagram swooped in with its Reels and Alphabet’s YouTube with Shorts, both TikTok-like products, and converted many of the influencers and eyeballs that had been left idle.

The services were popular. But something was lost along the way, experts said. Much of the homespun charm of Indian TikTok never found a new home. It became harder for small-time creators to be discovered.

Nikhil Pahwa, a digital policy analyst in New Delhi, tracks the overall change to the departure from TikTok’s “algorithms, its special sauce,” which was “a lot more localized to Indian content” than the formulas used by the American giants that succeeded it.

Still, the NY Times piece suggests that once you get past all that, some former TikTok stars have succeeded on other platforms.

The WSJ article, though, suggests younger users in India are still angry about how all this played out and don’t feel particularly happy with what they’re left with:

Today, some of the platform’s fans in the South Asian country still mourn its absence. They say rival Indian services that sprung up in TikTok’s wake aren’t as appealing. While new short-video offerings from YouTube and Instagram have offered alternatives, some feel they lack TikTok’s allure. And some fans are still angry at the government for booting out TikTok.

Indeed, as people interviewed by the WSJ note, the whole thing seemed to be for no real reason other than a weird power flex by the government:

“India is a free and democratic country and authorities can’t just force decisions and restrict freedom of speech and expression just because you have political disagreements with another country,” said 18-year-old Noushad Ali, who used to make TikTok videos about teenage romance.

“Why did the Indian government ban it?” asked Ritik Tannk, a former TikTok creator who made comedy videos, one of which garnered 16 million views. “Our data gets passed on through other apps also, like Facebook and YouTube. Why ban just TikTok for data privacy?”

The WSJ piece also notes how some ancillary businesses were impacted by TikTok shutting down in ways you might not expect:

TikTok’s absence in India is felt by local vendors working in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, a shopping district where crowds of creators once gathered to shoot their videos.

Ramesh Gupta runs a snack shop in the area. His sales have fallen about 20% since the TikTok ban, he said. He enjoyed watching young men and women with colorful hair and shiny sunglasses dance and sing, and liked serving them meals when they rested between shots.

“They would break for lunch and have tea and snacks like noodles, samosas and cutlets at my shop,” he said. “Those days are gone now.”

Again, it’s not as if the world will end if the US bans TikTok as well, but it seems like a weird way to deal with any actual privacy issues. It also seems like an even stranger way to support basic freedoms in the US, by suggesting that American freedoms can’t withstand a popular content app from China.

People in India felt a real loss to having TikTok shut down. Young people were angry about their government making nonsense moves. I imagine the response in the US would be quite similar.