Karni Sena supporters display a banner and shout slogans during a protest against China outside a mobile phone market in Ahmedabad, India, on July 1, 2020.The Associated Press
When the year started, Mamta Verma, a 27-year-old stay-at-home mother and content creator from a rural town in Madhya Pradesh, India, skyrocketed to social-media stardom for her Indianized robotic choreography and fuss-free backdrops.
“I went from five likes on my first video to over one million followers,” Ms. Verma says.
But on June 29, when the Indian government announced a ban on TikTok and 58 other Chinese-owned apps, she lost them all.
This is the second ban on TikTok in India. The first, which sought to ban explicit content on the app, lasted six days in April, 2019, before being struck down by a state court.
This time, there is no end in sight. A statement released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology stated that the latest ban was “in view of the emergent nature of threats” and suggested the targeted apps were engaged in activities that were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.” In September, the ministry announced it would be banning an additional 118 Chinese-owned apps.
“This current ban is nothing like the first one,” says foreign-policy analyst Narayani Basu. “[It] came directly after border clashes with China in June, and despite official claims of it being about data security, it’s clear that it was a reaction to what had happened in Ladakh.”
Since May, Chinese and Indian troops have faced off and engaged in skirmishes along three disputed stretches of the Sino-Indian border. On June 15, troops engaged in the deadliest clash in 45 years in Ladakh, allegedly leaving 20 Indian soldiers and three-dozen Chinese soldiers dead.
As soon as the Indian government announced the latest ban, comparisons between the prior ban circulated, with nationalists praising the government’s decision. During the previous one, Bytedance, the company that owns TikTok, said it was incurring a US$500,000 daily loss.
TikTok had amassed immense popularity in India. The country became the app’s largest overseas market with 200 million registered users, the vast majority rural Indians such as Ms. Verma. A report found that the app was the most popular social-media platform among rural Indians, who marginally outmatch their urban counterparts in terms of internet usage.
In India, where the rural-urban divide is stark, this is significant. Seventy per cent of the country lives in rural areas, but the average worker in a village earns only half of what their urban counterpart does.
Joy Das, a digital advertising consultant based in Mumbai who worked with rural and urban TikTok influencers before the ban, attributes the app’s popularity in rural India to the platform itself. Where Instagram was already saturated with the urban elite, TikTok was simpler.
“TikTok was like a social-media equalizer; there was no marketing campaign done specifically to make [TikTok] popular in India or in rural India at all,” Ms. Das says, “but the kind of content people were posting was about their everyday life – it was ordinary people doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way.” Subsequently, the platform became saturated in regional Indian languages. “There was a time when TikTok downloads were higher than Facebook in India.”
Akash and Santosh Jadhav, who ran a TikTok account called IndianFarmer94 from rural Maharashtra, saw this first hand. “We were on YouTube for 2½ years and TikTok for just one year but TikTok gave us a lot more returns.” They had more than one million followers on TikTok, versus 660,000 subscribers on YouTube. Just before the ban, sponsorship offers and collaborations on TikTok were piling into their inbox, the pair says.
By the time India went on lockdown because of COVID-19, TikTok was still actively recruiting employees in India. Brands had gone so far as to sponsor rural influencers whose audience was within their target demographic, Ms. Das adds.
Ms. Verma, who typically earned 300 rupees ($5.40) a gig cooking for weddings and social functions, was suddenly out of work when the pandemic hit. Her husband, a security guard, became the primary breadwinner. Through her TikTok fame, she says, she earned between 3,000 and 4000 rupees.
For Aslam Agariya, a “carrom master” from Mathura, in Gujarat, the loss was even greater. The 26-year-old was popular online for his demonstrations of moves in the traditional Indian tabletop game. He lost a monthly income of nearly 30,000 rupees with the ban, as well 2.5 million followers.
Indian app developers flocked to fill the gap in the market. Homegrown alternatives currently include Chingari, Mitron, Roposo and MX TakaTak, whose logo and interface are nearly identical to TikTok’s.
Yet, nearly four months later, rural influencers such as Ms. Verma, Mr. Agariya and the Jadhavs are nowhere near the levels of success they had achieved before the ban.
“I started using Roposo and Instagram,” says Ms. Verma, who had hoped the TikTok ban would be temporary. “I feel sad, at times,” she adds. “I miss reading the likes and comments I used to get on TikTok every day – it made me feel seen. I’m stuck on 56,000 followers on Instagram and 140,000 on Roposo.”
Mr. Agariya now uses MX TakaTak in addition to Instagram for his tutorials. He has amassed 180,000 fans and reached verified status. “I do miss TikTok,” he says. “[These are] growing, but slowly.”
These new apps, Ms. Das says, aren’t getting the same traction because they don’t serve the same purpose; they are simply filling a gap, not creating a niche as TikTok had done. “It’s distressing for people who over months or years have posted content and built a [fanbase] and capital without much effort,” she says.
Elsewhere in the world Instagram’s new Reels feature has offered a viable alternative to TikTok, but its algorithms are better suited for a largely urban population, so rural Indian creators haven’t had much luck with it either.
In a statement released on social media after the latest ban, TikTok said it had “democratized the internet” by making its app available in 14 Indian languages. It maintained that it had not shared user data with any foreign government, including Beijing. And the made-in-India apps alternatives are not immune from flaws. Shortly after Chingari was released, security defects within the app became apparent, allegedly allowing hackers access to users' accounts, where they were able to change settings and even upload content.
A recent survey by YouGov India, a global market research and data company, found that more than 60 per cent of Indians are hopeful the ban on TikTok will be lifted.
“All social media apps have a fairly moderate level of risk in terms of data security,” Ms. Basu, the foreign-policy analyst says. “Banning an app doesn’t solve anything. In fact, if anything, it raises some rather compelling questions on the issue of privacy and freedom of expression.”
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