When Congress passed a bill in April 2024 ordering ByteDance to either sell TikTok or face a ban, many speculated that ByteDance would opt to sell, because the American market was too valuable to relinquish freely. But TikTok actually faced an even bigger exodus of users in 2020, when India banned the app.
At the time, India was TikTok’s biggest foreign market outside of China, with 200 million users. (For comparison, the U.S. currently has over 170 million TikTok users.) Following military clashes along the disputed border between India and China, the Indian government banned TikTok along with over 50 other Chinese apps, citing national security concerns.
Despite the ban, TikTok did just fine in expanding around the world, while national and international tech companies rushed to fill the Indian void, in the process transforming their global approaches to social media. At the same time, digital rights activists tell TIME that the Indian government used the ban as precedent to crack down upon other digital platforms they deemed to be a threat. The way that users, tech giants, the government, and TikTok all adapted to the ban offer clues about what could unfold in the U.S. in the coming months.
Post-ban opportunity
Indian users flocked to TikTok as early as 2017. Video was already a dominant format in the country, buoyed by massive 4G and 5G infrastructure projects that allowed people with smartphones in remote villages to stream content. TikTok took that ecosystem even farther, allowing India’s millions of regional dialect speakers to share content and create digital communities. (At the same time, caste-based hate speech grew rapidly on the platform.)
“A lot of the people in the rural part of the country were okay with just being themselves, and creating a 15-second clip of some song they liked,” says Murli Kanne, an entrepreneur based in Hyderabad, India, who was working in influencer marketing at the time. “People started getting followers really easily. Hindi was mostly the language used in the viral TikToks, but a lot of regional content popped up as well.”
When the Indian government banned TikTok in June 2020, some influencers striving for global fame started using VPNs to post on TikTok. But for the millions and millions of smaller-scale users, local companies rushed to meet their demand, including MX TakaTak, Chingari, and Moj—which was launched in July 2020 by the Indian social media powerhouse ShareChat, registered over one million downloads within a week. In November 2020, at least 13 of the top 100 social apps in the Google Play Store in India were TikTok clones, with most of them newly launched, Rest of World reported. Many of these apps offered money to influencers to post on their platforms. The Indian government encouraged these efforts by issuing an Innovation Challenge to build local versions of banned apps.
Read More: Will You Still Be Able to Use TikTok If It’s Banned? Here’s What You Need to Know
Big Tech takes over
But as these local apps fought for market share, they were about to fall behind much larger and more-resourced American competitors. “A few of these apps were not up to the mark when we compare tech,” Kanne says. “I don’t think they had a chance with the giants against them.”
YouTube was already a hugely popular platform in India. Within months of the TikTok ban, its parent company Alphabet launched a beta version of YouTube Shorts in the country. And because audiences were already on the platform, many Indian content creators found instant success with Shorts. Comedy creator Dushyant Kukreja found that his Shorts received similar levels of views as his TikTok videos, and he soon grew his YouTube following from 40,000 to over 6 million. Creator Manjusha Martin, who had built a TikTok audience of over 770,000, created a web series on Shorts, surpassing 2 million followers on that platform.
Buoyed by this success, YouTube soon expanded Shorts to dozens more countries. By the summer of 2022, they reported 1.5 billion viewers every month, rivaling TikTok’s viewership.
Instagram, not to be outdone, pushed out its Reels feature in August 2020, and made India the first country to have a version of the app with Reels in a separate tab. Indians tuned into watch music and cricket, with over 1 million reels created related to the 2022 ICC T20 World Cup. In 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Reels made up more than 20% of the time people spent on Instagram, making it the company’s “fastest-growing content format by far.”
Ultimately, most of the Indian-based TikTok alternatives folded, and Indian audiences and creators got used to Shorts and Reels. The scrappy and broadly rural culture of TikTok in India winnowed down into a more top-down influencer culture on those two platforms. India is now the biggest market for both YouTube (almost 500 million monthly users) and Instagram (362 million).
Global competition and privacy concerns
Although the Indian userbase was a significant loss for TikTok, the company simply expanded across the world. Research shows that TikTok’s userbase essentially doubled between 2020 and 2024. And the U.S. wasn’t even the main driver of this uptick: Indonesia has the most TikTok users in the world. (Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam also have sizable audiences.) TikTok’s current dominance across continents, and its proven ability to rebound from previous massive bans, mean that ByteDance is likely in no hurry to sell the app. Rather, it will likely simply continue its expansion abroad, and hope that America’s political situation changes.
Meta and YouTube, meanwhile, have a huge opportunity to grow, just like they did in India in 2020. And this time, they have a huge headstart, because Reels and Shorts are already a key part of American social media.
However, many Americans have expressed the desire for new platforms—as evidenced by the flood of TikTokers to the Chinese app Red Note over the past week. “Unless you pay Meta to promote your posts, they’re not really going to show it to people,” Christina Shuler, a South Carolina-based entrepreneur who recently signed up for Red Note, tells TIME. “And Facebook is just a bunch of angry people on there. So it was refreshing to get on Red Note and know that my content was appreciated.”
As users search for a new landing spot, digital rights activists view these TikTok bans from a more ominous perspective. Raman Jit Singh Chima, the Asia-Pacific policy director at Access Now, says that India’s TikTok ban led to an increase in the government censorship of digital content. Over the last couple months, VPN apps have been disappearing from the country’s app stores, seemingly for not complying with local rules. “The ban has built a precedent that has allowed the Indian government to continue blocking access to more web and social media content, including very often content posted by journalists or critics of the Administration,” Chima claims.
U.S.-based activists worry that the same thing could happen following the U.S. ban, especially given that the Supreme Court upheld it, giving the green light for Congress to put pressure on other social media apps they deem dangerous going forward. Other countries may follow suit and issue their own bans, as well. “
We are disappointed to see the Court sweep past the undisputed content-based justification for the law—to control what speech Americans see and share with each other—and rule only based on the shaky data privacy concerns,” David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a statement emailed to TIME.
The post Here’s What Happened When India Banned TikTok in 2020 appeared first on TIME.
