The Albanian cabinet decided to shut down Tiktok for 12 months on Thursday, accusing popular video sharing platforms of inciting violence and bullying, especially among children.
Education Minister Ogerta Manastirliu said officials are in contact with Tiktok to install filters such as parental control, age verification and the inclusion of Albanian in the application.
The minister said the authorities had held 1,300 meetings with about 65,000 parents who “recommended and favored the closure or restriction of the Tiktok platform”.
The cabinet began the move last year after a teenager stabbed another teenager in November’s argument.
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Tiktok did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the government’s decision.
When Prime Minister Edi Rama said in December that social media platforms were closed, Tiktok asked for “emergency clarification from the Albanian government.”
Rama said on Thursday that they are having an active conversation with the company, and Tiktok will soon visit the country to provide “a range of measures to improve children’s safety.”
On November 28, 2017, the Albanian flag flew in Skopje (then Macedonia). (Photography by Nake Batev/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
“No evidence was found that the perpetrator or victim had a Tiktok account, and in fact, the video that confirmed that the incident had been posted on another platform, not Tiktok,” the company said.
Albanian children are the largest group of Tiktok users in the country, the researchers say.
Albanian parents are paying more and more attention to reports that children are inspired by content on social media to bring their knife to school, or bullying cases facilitated by stories they see on tiktok.
Authorities have increased police presence in some schools and have developed other measures, including training programs for teachers, students and their parents.
The opposition has not agreed to Tiktok’s closure and set protests against the move on March 15. It said the ban was “an act of intolerance, fear and horror.”
Tiktok, run by Chinese technology companies, faces problems in many countries and has recently been briefly offline in the United States to comply with a law that requires dispatch of the app to be stripped of the app or banned in the United States.
The app suspended its services in the U.S. for less than a day, before resuming services after Trump promised he would postpone the ban.
Earlier this week, UK data protection regulators said it was investigating how the app can use personal information from children aged 13 to 17 to provide them with content advice.
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The Information Commissioner’s Office said people are on how social media platforms use data generated by children’s online activities to power their recommendation algorithms and the potential to enable young people to see inappropriate or harmful content as a result.
