TIRANA, Albania (AP) – Albania’s prime minister said Sunday. Ban on TikTok his government announced the day before “There was no hasty reaction to a single incident.”
Prime Minister Edi Rama On Saturday, the government announced that the popular video service TikTok would be shut down for a year, accusing it of inciting violence and bullying, especially among children.
Authorities have held 1,300 meetings with teachers and parents since November, when another teenager was stabbed to death after an argument that started on a social media app. 90% of them support banning TikTok.
“The one-year ban on TikTok in Albania is not a hasty response to a single incident, but a carefully considered decision in consultation with the school parent community across the country,” Rama said.
Following Tirana’s decision, TikTok asked for “urgent clarification from the Albanian government” on the case of the stabbed teenager. “We found no evidence that either the perpetrator or the victim had a TikTok account, and multiple reports have confirmed that, in fact, the videos leading to this incident were posted on another platform rather than TikTok,” the company said in a statement. ” he said.
“Claiming that the teenage boy’s murder has nothing to do with TikTok because the conflict did not originate on the platform speaks to the seriousness of the threat TikTok poses to today’s children and youth, and the private view on TikTok.” It shows that they do not understand both the rationale behind their decision to ‘take responsibility for addressing this threat,”’ Rama said.
“Albania may be too small to demand that TikTok protect its children and young people from the horrific pitfalls of its algorithm,” he said, adding that TikTok “reproduces a never-ending hellish language of hate, violence, and bullying.” “I’m doing it,” he accused.
Albanian children make up the country’s largest group of TikTok users, according to local researchers.
Many young people in Albania did not support the ban.
“We publish our daily lives and entertain ourselves. So we use it in our free time,” he said in the town of Leschen, 75 kilometers (47 miles) north of the capital Tirana. said Samuel Sulmani, an 18-year-old resident. on sunday. “We do not agree to that because it would be a deprivation for us.”
But Albanian parents are growing concerned after reports of children bringing knives and other objects to school to use in arguments and bullying after stories they saw on TikTok.
“Our decision couldn’t be clearer: either TikTok will protect Albanian children, or Albania will protect children from TikTok,” Rama said.
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Follow Llazar Semini at https://x.com/lsemini
