Tiktok Ban petitioners have revealed they want Tiktok regulated.. not banned, for its immoral content.
Dr. Ezekiel Mutua, the CEO of Music Copyright Society of Kenya said the ‘ban’ was more of a click bait to call for the regulation of the application.
“What we wanted was like in media, When a dog bites a man it is not news but when a man bites the dog, it is news. Now It even attracted the attention of the President, and even the CEO of Tiktok” Dr. Mutua said.
The former KFCB CEO, a champion of clean content, said what is needed was regulation to weed out dirty, harmful content from the app which will in turn promote business and talents for its users.
Dr. Mutua was answering to a question posed by members of the National Assembly Committee on Public Petitions on why the petitioner ammended his plea from an earlier ban as read in the house by Speaker Moses Wetangula.
Bob Ndolo, the petitioner revealed that several Tiktok influencers had called on him to drop the petition, as it will harm their source of livelihood.
“We have had meetings with content creators and they have really pleaded with us to drop our petition because to them it is a very big source of income. We thought about it and that is why we want Tiktok.”
Kenya has the highest TikTok usage rate in the world, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023, with 54% of users using the app for general purposes and 29% for news.
According to Ndolo, TikTok’s live content feature is inappropriate because it “promotes violence, explicit sexual content, hate speech, vulgar language, and offensive behavior, which is a serious threat to Kenya’s cultural and religious values.”
This petition prompted a meeting between President William Ruto and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, with the leader vowing to work with the Kenyan government to review and monitor its content.
The collaboration will ensure that content on the platform follows TikTok guidelines.
They also announced that TikTok would open a Kenyan office in Nairobi, employing more Keynans.
