Albanian prime minister says TikTok ban was not a rash reaction: NPR

A view of the TikTok app logo in Tokyo, Japan, September 28, 2020.

Kiichiro Sato/AP

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Kiichiro Sato/AP

TIRANA, Albania – Albania’s prime minister said Sunday that the ban on TikTok his government announced a day earlier “was not a hasty response to a single incident.”

Prime Minister Edi Rama said Saturday the government will shut down TikTok for a year, accusing the popular video service of encouraging violence and bullying, especially among children.

Authorities have held 1,300 meetings with teachers and parents since the death of a teenager in November by another teenager after an argument that started on social media apps. Ninety percent of them approve of the ban on TikTok.

“The one-year ban on TikTok in Albania is not a hasty reaction to a single incident, but a carefully considered decision made in consultation with parent communities in schools across the country,” Rama said.

Following Tirana’s decision, TikTok asked for “quick clarity from the Albanian government” in the case of the stabbed teenager. The company said it had found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts, and multiple reports have indeed confirmed that videos leading up to this incident were posted on another platform, not TikTok.

“To claim that the killing of the teenage boy has no connection to TikTok because the conflict did not occur on the platform shows a lack of understanding of both the seriousness of the threat TikTok poses to children and young people today and the reasoning behind our decision to to take responsibility for dealing with this menace,” Rama said.

“Albania is perhaps too small to demand that TikTok protect children and young people from the terrifying pitfalls of its algorithm,” he said, blaming TikTok for “reproducing the endless hell of the language of hate, violence, bullying and so on .”

Albanian children make up the largest group of TikTok users in the country, according to domestic researchers.

Many young people in Albania did not approve of the ban.

“We reveal our daily life and entertain ourselves, that is, we exploit it in our free time,” Samuel Sulmani, an 18-year-old in the town of Rreshen, 75 kilometers (47 miles) north of the capital Tirana, said on Sunday. “We do not agree with it because it is a deprivation for us.”

But Albanian parents have grown increasingly concerned following reports of children taking knives and other objects to school to use in arguments or cases of bullying fueled by stories they see on TikTok.

“Our decision could not be clearer: Either TikTok protects Albania’s children, or Albania wants to protect its children from TikTok,” Rama said.