A Flower Got 100 Million Views A Day After India Banned TikTok

India is the second most populous country in the world. And this makes India one of the most alluring countries for tech companies to get many of their users.

But the government has other thoughts, as in 2020, India has banned TikTok and 223 other Chinese apps.

Because the TikTok hype has also gotten to India, there is no denying the the demand is high. Because TikTok is not available in the country, a number of similar short video apps have expanded rapidly and receive millions of hits every day.

Following this, an expected thing happen: a photo of a flower received a ton of traffic.

The photo of the flower is from Wikimedia, and it has received more than 75 million daily hits.

To put it in another perspective, that image alone accounts to almost 20% of Wikimedia’s requests for images.

The issue was first made public by Chris Albon, the Director of Machine Learning at Wikimedia.

When the team at Wikimedia realized the anomaly, they found that the high number of requests were coming from a single Indian social media app.

But after further investigation, they found that the Indian app does reference the image, but does not display the image anywhere in the interface.

The team found that each time a user of the app opens the app, the app will request the image from Wikimedia's server.

And this happened right after the government of India started banning TikTok.

Given the massive volume of the traffic, Wikimedia had to "ban those specific requests" until the issue can be solved by the developer of the Indian app.

Wikimedia refrained from naming the app, but its analysis page shows that the image was once seen by more than 100 million people per day at its peak on December 31, 2020.

It all began in 2019, when the government of India was asked to ban the TikTok app because it "encourages pornography" and shows "inappropriate content".

In the court, it was noted that TikTok is very famous among children and minors, thus making them vulnerable to predators.

That ban was then lifted after the Madras High Court reversed its order, following a plea from TikTok developer ByteDance Technology.

But later in 2020, TikTok was again banned.

India banned TikTok, along with 223 other Chinese apps, saying that they were "prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order".

Stated by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on 29 June 2020, the ban was India's response to a military clash between Indian and Chinese troops in a disputed territory along their shared border between Ladakh and western China.

The government of India said that the decision to ban the many apps was in order to "protect the data and privacy of its 1.3 billion citizens," and to also put a stop to technology that was "stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers outside India".

Further reading: India Bans TikTok Because The Platform Turns People Into Murderers