Albania plans to ban access to Chinese video-sharing app TikTok for a year, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced on Saturday.
The platform, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, will be blocked within six to eight weeks after necessary technical preparations are made, he said in the capital Tirana.
Rama said the content TikTok offers in China is completely different from what it distributes abroad. “There is only dirt and filth there,” he said, according to state news agency ATA.
Young people and children in particular are being endangered and “held hostage” by the platform, he added.
Discussions about the possible harmful effects of TikTok reached a peak in Albania after a 14-year-old student was stabbed to death during a fight between two groups last month.
The two groups had agreed to meet for the ultimately fatal brawl after antagonizing each other on TikTok.
It is not yet clear how the TikTok ban should be implemented. In countries where certain content is blocked, people often find loopholes to circumvent bans, for example resorting to virtual private networks (VPNs), which make it appear as if a user is in another country.
