Should TikTok be Banned in Indonesia?

Topic 4: Should TikTok be Banned in Indonesia?

Group 6: Dewi, Agil, Mukty, Najwa, Tiara, Zeta

Thesis statement:

Social media platforms are rocketing, especially in Indonesia. Various advanced features are also presented in it to make users survive. According to the research, currently a rapidly growing social media platform is a short video application, which allows users to share and enjoy various entertainment and educational content. One of the examples of this platform is called TikTok. It is a social media app dedicated to short-form videos created for and consumed by users. The length of videos is 15 to 60 seconds. Amateur and professional creators alike can add effects like filters, background music, and stickers to their videos, and can collaborate on content and create split-screen duet videos, even if they are in different locations (D’Souza, 2023).

TikTok is very close to the hearts of Indonesian people. This short video sharing platform made by Bytedance is still the talk of the community around the world, with a total of 10 million active users in Indonesia and 732 million active users in the world (Julianto, 2021). Data indicates that users in Indonesia reportedly spent 29 minutes to watch, create, find and share videos on the platform, as shared by TikTok Indonesia in October 2019. It also received the Best App and the Most Entertaining App of 2018 awards from Google Play.

Despite the impressive growth and numbers, things haven’t always gone well for TikTok. On July 3, 2018, the Indonesian Communications and Information Ministry temporarily blocked the app after learning it contained “pornography, inappropriate content and blasphemy.” The ban was lifted one week later, however, after the ministry said that TikTok showed its commitment to deleting any negative content on the platform (The Jakarta Post, 2020).

Arguments:

Firstly, TikTok can make the users have an excessive screen time. If they are scrolling TikTok to procrastinate, then spending time on TikTok becomes wasteful. Secondly, TikTok result in vandalism. TikTok users posted ‘challenge’ content to introduce users to some harmful activities, such as destroying school bathrooms. Moreover, as an example in Indonesia, there is a guy who told their parents into making an uneducated content, to beg to his viewers to be given a reward from TikTok, such as coins and stickers that could be redeemed by money later. He asked his mom to take a mud bath, a video that is very unfavorable to be viewed not only by all people but especially the minors. In addition, there is also another content that shows body curves, or setting some beauty standards, which might be sensitive to other people. Finally, TikTok’s algorithm is hard to predict. Let’s say you are making a video that you expect to pass through a “For You Page” or an FYP, with the similar type of video, length, and same hashtag and same time, but you cannot necessarily expect the same result, as being in the For You Page takes a lot of luck.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, there are definitely a lot of disadvantages to using TikTok, for instance, TikTok is a huge time waster, people spend hours scrolling and can’t figure out where the time went, it also results in vandalism and its algorithm is hard to predict. As users, it is advised that we should be considerate in filtering what content that we want to watch, so TikTok can be a useful app in the future.

Sources:

https://www.investopedia.com/what-is-tiktok-4588933

https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/02/20/banned-and-adored-tiktok-in-a-nutshell.html

https://voi.id/en/technology/84237

DMU Timestamp: March 30, 2023 18:12