Albania wants to block access to Tiktok for a year

The Balkan country of Albania wants to block access to the video platform Tiktok for a year. Prime Minister Edi Rama announced this. After appropriate technical preparations, the platform should no longer be accessible in Albania in six to eight weeks, said Rama in the capital Tirana. The portal, which is successful with short videos, belongs to the China-based company Bytedance.

The content that Tiktok offers in China is completely different than that which is distributed outside of China. “There is only dirt and feces,” Rama was quoted as saying by the state news agency ATA. Children and young people in particular would be endangered and “taken hostage”.

Discussions about the possible harmful effects of Tiktok arose in Albania after a 14-year-old student was killed in a stabbing almost a month ago. The two groups of young people involved had become hostile to each other on Tiktok and had arranged to have a brawl that ended up being fatal.

How the Tiktok block would be implemented in Albania initially remained unclear. In addition, there are always loopholes in such bans: In countries where certain content is blocked, users often resort to protected network connections (VPN) to bypass such blocks. VPN tunnels can make it appear as if a user is in another country.