(Dan Tri) – After India, the world’s most populous country, banned the TikTok social network four years ago, people and businesses operating in the country have gradually adapted to the absence of the above application.

India has banned TikTok since 2020 (Illustration: AFP).

Mid-week, the US House of Representatives passed a bill requiring TikTok owner, Chinese company ByteDance, to sell all its shares, or face the risk of being shut down in the next 6 months.

This development has caused many of the 170 million users in the US to express concern.

In June 2020, after a deadly clash on the India-China border, the New Delhi government suddenly issued a ban on TikTok and a number of other famous Beijing applications.

India believes that these are applications that affect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the South Asian country.

India’s somewhat quick decision caused `shock` for the country’s 200 million TikTok users.

`Tiktok ban has created a business opportunity worth billions of dollars… 200 million TikTok users need another platform to switch to,` said Nikhil Pahwa, founder of Delhi-based technology website MediaNama.

According to Pahwa, American technology companies are finally seizing the opportunity with new options for customers.

Life without TikTok

India’s ban has affected many people.

By 2020, TikTok had become very popular among Indians locked down due to the Covid-19 epidemic.

Saptarshi Ray, head of Bengaluru-based influencer marketing platform Viralo, said: `Everyone in India wants to be a Bollywood star and TikTok has made that dream come true by making every

However, after TikTok was banned, they quickly had alternatives.

Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram launched Reels, a video social network quite similar to TikTok.

Indian-developed applications such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began to receive attention from users with increasing popularity.

However, those local startups are also `out of breath` when competing with American `giants` that possess greater reach and financial power.

Citing a study from consulting firm Oxford Economics, a Google spokesperson said the `YouTube creative ecosystem` contributed about $2 billion to the Indian economy in 2022.

Indian content creators also quickly migrated old TikTok videos to the new platform, some gaining millions of followers within a year.

Safety in cyberspace

American officials and lawmakers have long expressed concern that the Chinese government could force ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to hand over data collected from American users.

China and TikTok have repeatedly denied this information.

CNN quoted cybersecurity experts as saying that the above concerns are still largely hypothetical.

Vivan Sharan, an expert from technology policy consulting firm Koan Advisory Group, believes that users themselves need a major change in their awareness of cybersecurity, the applications on their phones, or what they download.

In addition, US lawmakers are concerned that TikTok could be a tool for China to propagate information to influence Americans.

However, experts say that even if TikTok has problems and is banned, cyber threats to users still exist.