Madurai: The Madras High Court on Wednesday lifted the ban imposed by it on the Chinese application TikTok. The interim ban on the downloading of the app was imposed on April 3.
The Chinese company on Wednesday submitted to the court that it had put moderating mechanisms in place to regulate obscene content. However, the court cautioned the company would be charged with contempt of court if the regulatory mechanisms were not found in place.
Senior advocate Issac Mohanlal represented TikTok and said that the company followed all laid down standards and had better privacy provisions than other social media platforms. He also told the division bench of justice N Kirubakaran and and justice S S Sundar that it was only an intermediary platform and did upload content.
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The court said, on the claim made by Mohanlal that TikTok has not violated any law, that it was only because there were no laws to address the issues concerning social media platforms and cited instances where the Parliament took several years to pass legislation.
Arvind Datar, an amicus curiae in this case also submitted a note to the High Court and said that prohibition of the app which is an intermediary website cannot be the solution and cited previous judgments of the Supreme Court and the guidelines of the Information Technology Act.