Chinese firm ByteDance to reallocate resources if Pakistan unblocks TikTok

Islamabad, October 18

Chinese video sharing app TikTok has promised to put more resources in Pakistan to improve its services after the authorities here blocked it over “indecent content”, a media report said on Sunday.

ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, regretted that its services remain suspended in Pakistan more than a week after the country’s telecommunication authority banned it over its contents, the Express Tribune reported.

“TikTok’s mission is to inspire creativity and joy, and that’s just what we’ve done in Pakistan. We’ve built a community whose creativity and passion has brought joy to households across Pakistan and opened vital economic opportunities to incredibly talented creators,” the company said on Saturday.

It said that though the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) acknowledged and appreciated these efforts, Tik Tok’s services remain blocked in the country and the PTA had not communicated with the company about how to resolve the issue.

“We continue to hope that our productive dialogue with the PTA can bring assurance of the government’s commitment to a stable, enabling environment whereby we can explore investing further in the market, including in the inspiring talent we’ve seen thrive on TikTok,” it said.

It promised to reallocate resources to improve its system. “If the government of Pakistan decides to reopen access to our services in the future, we can assess our allocation of resources to this market,” the company said.

The company said its users and creators in Pakistan are still unable to access TikTok, more than one week after our services were blocked by the PTA.

“After TikTok was blocked in Pakistan, we continued to engage with the PTA to demonstrate our commitment to comply with local laws and further enhance our content moderation capacity,” ByteDance further said.

The company said it made concerted efforts over the last one year to address questions from the government of Pakistan around the content moderation process, including significantly increasing the capacity of the local language content moderation team.

ByteDance regretted that it’s unfortunate that Pakistan’s vibrant online community is still unable to showcase their talent and creativity to our hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

The popular platform allows users to create short music, lip-sync, dance, comedy and talent videos of 3 to 15 seconds, and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. PTI

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