The Albanian cabinet decided on Thursday to close Tiktok for 12 months, blaming the popular platform for sharing videos for inciting violence and harassment, especially among children.
Education Minister Ogerta Manastirliu said officials are in contact with TIKK in installing filters such as parental control, age verification and Albanian language involvement in demand.
Authorities had held 1,300 meetings with about 65,000 parents who “recommended and were in favor of closing or restricting the TIKTOK platform,” the minister said.
The cabinet began its action last year after a teenager stabbed another teenager to death in November after a quarrel that began in Tiktok.
Tiktok did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the government’s decision.
When Prime Minister Edi Rama said in December that they intended to close the social media platform, Tiktok demanded “urgent clarity from the Albanian government” in the case of a knife.
On Thursday, Rama said they were in a “positive dialogue with the company”, and that Tiktok would visit the place soon to offer “a series of measures to increase safety for children”.
The company said “had not found any evidence that the perpetrator or victim had Tiktok accounts, and numerous reports have in fact confirmed the videos that led to the incident were being posted on another platform, not Tiktok.”
Albanian children constitute the largest group of TIKTOK users in the country, according to researchers.
There has been increasing concerns from Albanian parents following reports of children inspired by social media content to get knives at school, or cases of harassment promoted by the stories they see in Tiktok.
Authorities have increased the presence of police in several schools and created other measures including training programs for teachers, students and their parents.
The opposition disagreed with the closure of Tiktok and decided March 15 for a protest against the mass. He said the ban was “an act of intolerance, fear and terror from free thought and expression”.
Tiktok, which is operated by the Chinese technology firm bydthance, has faced questions in many countries and was briefly offline in the United States to meet a law seeking bydance to divert the app or be banned in the US
The app suspended its services in the US for less than the day before resetting the Trump insurance service that it will push it by stopping it.
At the beginning of this week, the UK data protection supervisor said he was investigating how the app uses the personal information of 13 to 17-year-olds to provide content recommendations for them.
The Information Commissioner’s office said there are increasing concerns about how social media platforms are using data created by online activity of children to empower their recommendation algorithms, and the potential for young people to see inappropriate or harmful content as a result.
#Albania #closes #Tik #year #blame #platform #promoting #violence #harassment #children
Image Source : nypost.com