TikTok India

» see tiktok.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

This one's years overlap mine exactly and I still have no claim on it. TikTok was on phones in Turkey in 2020 the same as everywhere else and it is on them now, which means the thing that died here is not an app I could have used and lost. What died was a country's version of it, and there is no equivalent event in my life to point at. The closest I can honestly get is that I have watched a service I use get blocked at the national level, and I know what the first hour of that feels like from the inside.

The Indian TikTok was not a smaller copy of the global one. It was the largest piece of it. Roughly two hundred million accounts, which was more than the United States and Europe put together at that point, and a creator economy that ran on cheap data and cheap Android handsets rather than on production budgets. Most of the coverage at the time missed the specific thing that made it matter, which is that for an enormous number of those people it was the first internet product they had ever been good at.

TikTok itself shipped internationally in September 2017 as the export build of Douyin, and the Indian audience really arrived after ByteDance merged Musical.ly into it in August 2018. Two years later it was over.

~ the case file ~

~ the order ~

On 15 June 2020 Indian and Chinese troops fought in the Galwan Valley in Ladakh and Indian soldiers were killed. Two weeks later, on 29 June, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a blocking order under Section 69A of the IT Act covering fifty-nine Chinese apps. TikTok was the headline name on the list. UC Browser and Shareit and a long tail of others went with it.

The stated grounds were data and sovereignty rather than the clash, which is how these orders are always written. The companies were given a window to respond to questions about privacy and security. The window closed, the answers did not satisfy anyone, and in January 2021 the government told the affected firms the block was permanent. There was no negotiated exit and no sale of the local business.

~ the hole it left ~

The market moved faster than anyone expected. ShareChat put out Moj in July 2020 and had a million downloads inside a week. MX TakaTak and Chingari went after the same audience with the same format. None of them held it. Instagram launched Reels in India within weeks of the ban and YouTube brought Shorts in behind it, and the two of them absorbed most of what TikTok had built (roughly).

The creators are the part that got flattened. A follower count is not portable. Somebody with four million followers on 28 June 2020 woke up on the 30th with an audience that existed only as a number they could describe to people, and the ones who rebuilt mostly rebuilt smaller. still. That is the actual cost of a platform death and it never shows up in the coverage, because the coverage is about the companies.

~ what a border death looks like ~

Most graves on this site are companies that ran out of money or products that a parent company got bored of. This is a different mechanism and it is becoming a more common one. The service was healthy. The users were there. It was working, and it was switched off by a state for reasons that had nothing to do with whether it worked.

India's ban is also the reference case everyone reaches for whenever the same question comes up somewhere else, because it is the only one where a very large market actually went through with it and the after-picture is available. What that picture shows is that the audience does not go away, it just gets re-housed, usually by whichever incumbent is fastest to ship a clone. TikTok is still alive everywhere else. It is only dead in the place where it was biggest.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »