Chinese firm to reallocate resources if Pakistan unblocks TikTok

TikTok, a viral Chinese video-sharing social networking service, has regretted that its services remain suspended in Pakistan more than a week after the Pakistani regulator blocked it over “indecent content”. “TikTok’s mission is to inspire creativity and joy, and that's just what we've done in Pakistan. We've built a community whose creativity and passion has brought joy to households across Pakistan and opened vital economic opportunities to incredibly talented creators,” ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, said in a statement on Saturday.

“This is why we're sad that our users and creators in Pakistan are still unable to access TikTok, more than one week after our services were blocked by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA),” it added.

"Over the past year, we've made concerted efforts to address questions from the government of Pakistan around our content moderation process, including significantly increasing the capacity of our local language content moderation team."

The popular platform allows users to created short music, lip-sync, dance, comedy and talent videos of 3 to 15 seconds, and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds.

“After TikTok was blocked in Pakistan, we continued to engage with the PTA to demonstrate our commitment to comply with local laws and further enhance our content moderation capacity,” ByteDance further said.

“Though the PTA acknowledged and appreciated these efforts, our services remain blocked in the country and we have received no communication from PTA.”

We continue to hope that our productive dialogue with the PTA can bring assurance of the government's commitment to a stable, enabling environment whereby we can explore investing further in the market, including in the inspiring talent we’ve seen thrive on TikTok.

“If the government of Pakistan decides to reopen access to our services in the future, we can assess our allocation of resources to this market,” the company said.

ByteDance regretted that it's unfortunate that Pakistan’s vibrant online community is still unable to showcase their talent and creativity to our hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

“We look forward to being able to reconnect with the energetic and talented youth of Pakistan and play our role in the success story of Pakistan."