TikTok ban order to sustain or not? Madras High Court hearing on April 24

In what could be interim relief for TikTok, Supreme Court on Monday issued an ultimatum to the Madras High Court to act upon the plea against its ban order otherwise it stands vacated. The Madras High Court hearing is slotted for tomorrow, April 24.

Earlier this month, the Madras high court had directed the Centre to ban TikTok over concerns about "pornographic and inappropriate content" being made available through such apps. last week, the Supreme Court had earlier refused to stay the Madras High Court order.

A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna said that TikTok owner ByteDance can raise its grievances before the High Court on April 24. The bench said that the Madras High Court must act upon the plea during tomorrow's hearing.

Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for ByteDance said that TikTok is losing over Rs 4.5 crore a day. That aside, he argued that safety features of more than two million subscribers are at risk.

Singhvi said that stay on the ban order should be ordered as they were not heard at all on the issue. ByteDance had earlier told the apex court that TiKTok has over billion downloads.

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On April 3, the Madras High Court had also instructed the media not to broadcast video clips made with TikTok, which allows users to users film themselves while dancing to songs and lip-syncing to lyric and share those videos with friends.

Previously, the High Court has asked the government if it would enact a statute on the line of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the US.

The high court's interim order came on public interest litigation (PIL) that alleged the app encouraged paedophiles and the content "degraded culture and encouraged pornography."

Last week, Google and Apple to blocked TikTok in India, thus preventing users from downloading the app from Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

(With agency inputs)