TikTok, along dozens of other Chinese-created applications, has been banned in India following the 2020 China-India skirmishes, in which numerous casualties were reported. The application’s company ByteDance is now expected to lose an insane amount of money as a result of being banned in India.
In a recent report, Caixin (via The Economic Times) claims that the company expects to lose an absurd $6 billion because of the India ban. TikTok has been under fire before, but this time it is worse as it has nothing to do with the app and everything to do with China.
Because the application was created in China, numerous headlines started to call users to delete the app immediately. The ‘advice’ given by certain news outlets persisted even after TikTok representatives have released a statement that clearly said the data that gets stored on the servers goes to Singapore, far from China, which has no way of reaching it whatsoever.
“I can confirm that the Chinese government has never made a request to us for the TikTok data of Indian users,” CEO Kevin Mayer assured the Indian government. “If we do receive such a request in the future,” he added, “we would not comply.”
More Apps Were Banned
TikTok is only one of around 60 other applications with Chinese links that were banned by India for ‘prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order.’ The Chinese tech company ByteDance also developed apps like Helo, which is an incredibly popular social media app available in numerous languages from India and not only.
Halo is also one of the apps that got banned by India, and it could be an additional reason behind the staggering loss of money the company is expected to suffer. At this point, there isn’t much information about how other app makers are preparing to deal with the ban. However, they will surely lose a lot of money, like ByteDance expects to.
