Written by: Sajiya Tamang - 25065, Grade XI
Posted on: 28 November, 2023
As per the information provided by the government of Nepal, Tik Tok has been banned in Nepal. This issue has created many controversies and it has given rise to negative reactions and comments from the public towards the government for their action. Here, I will briefly talk about the matter and its positive and negative impacts. In my opinion, this action of the government is not justifiable and there are many negative consequences than positive.
According to the information provided by the Minister of communication and Information Technology, Rekha Sharma, the real reason for the ban was because it was disturbing social harmony, family structure and public relations. I agree that the unnecessary activities happening in Tik Tok was truly disturbing the peace of many families and their structure along with their relations, but I think that the decision for banning the whole app for the whole country was not necessary at all. In my view, instead of taking such a great action of banning Tik Tok, the government could have put different types of restrictions and age limitations in the app. They should have implemented strict monitoring system for controlling its misuse. It seems that they banned it when they could not monitor cyber activities. This reflects government’s inability to control such activities. This would have kept the children away from negative impacts. There would have been provision of punishment for the people promoting unnecessary and disturbing activities in Tik Tok.
There is a positive side of this issue despite the fact that it was not such a great decision. The positive effects are that the people and most of the teenagers who were addicted to using Tik Tok all the time forgetting their responsibilities won’t be able to use it anymore, and I think that they will start to think about their responsibilities now that Tik Tok is banned. People promoting such disturbing and unnecessary activities will not be able to do so. And those underage children getting affected by the bad influence and always wanting to watch Tik Tok being glued to their parents mobile phone will now be unable to watch it. It had created many eye problems in the underage children. Now I think that this problem will decrease. These are the positive effects that I see.
Now about the negative impacts, this action of the government has strongly affected people who were promoting their businesses through Tik Tok. Those social media influencers who thought that they could do something in Nepal for income without following the trend of going abroad are badly affected. And what I think and is also true is that the students were most affected by this. Students were getting various information about the unknown things from Tik Tok which helped them in many ways. But now that it is banned, they won’t be able to explore such things. We were getting so much information about our own country and the people of our country as well. Some can say that there are other media for getting information but it is not agreeable because there is no other media through which we can get information like we were getting from Tik Tok. This ban has adversely affected the social media usage, creativity and entertainment in the country. Tik Tok is a platform for exploring creative activities. It has also been a great medium for the income source for many people. But now there are more problems than there were before.
Finally, I think that banning the whole app instead of taking action to monitor such activities is not a good idea. Before taking decisions, the government should have thought in alternative ways instead of just the one
