TikTok’s breakneck rise from a niche video-sharing app to a global social media behemoth has drawn intense scrutiny, particularly over its links to China.

In Washington, the platform has been accused of espionage.

The European Union suspects it was used to sway Romania’s presidential election in favour of a far-right candidate.

And now Albania has banned it for a year, Prime Minister Edi Rama calling it the “thug of the neigbourhood”.

Here are the main controversies surrounding TikTok:

Albania: minimum one-year ban

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said Saturday the government would shut down social network TikTok for at least a year from 2025.

The move came less than a month after a 14-year-old student was killed and another injured in a fight near a school in Tirana.

The fight had developed from an online confrontation on social media.

Romania: suspected influence campaign

The EU is probing whether far-right presidential candidate Calin Georgescu’s surprise victory in the first round of Romania’s presidential election was aided by Russian meddling and “preferential treatment” by TikTok.

It is the third investigation the commission has launched against TikTok, which risks fines of up to six percent of its global turnover.

The platform said it had taken “robust actions” to tackle election-related misinformation. Russia has denied interfering in the vote.

US: sell-off pressure

The United States in April passed a law obliging TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell off the platform by January 19 on the grounds it allowed China to access data on US users.

If not, the platform would be banned in the United States — denying TikTok its claimed 170 million users in the countries.

TikTok admitted ByteDance employees in China had accessed Americans’ data but it has denied giving data to the Chinese authorities.

To protect data, the US government, the European Commission and Britain’s government had already banned TikTok from their employees’ work devices in 2023.

Australia: teenage ban

TikTok was among the many platforms targeted by a landmark law passed in Australia in November banning under-16s from accessing social media.

Social media firms that fail to comply with the law face fines of up to Aus$50 million (US$32.5 million) for “systemic breaches”.

TikTok said it was “disappointed” by the Australian legislation, claiming it could push young people to the “darker corners of the internet”.

Nearly a third of TikTok users are between 10 and 19 years old, according to the Wallaroo agency.

EU: engagement feature ditched

In August, the company, under pressure from EU regulators, was forced to ditch a feature in its TikTok Lite spinoff in France and Spain rewarding users for time spent in front of their screens.

In that rewards programme, users aged 18 and over could earn points to exchange for goods like vouchers or gift cards by liking and watching videos.

It was accused by the EU of potentially having “very addictive consequences”.

TikTok’s editing features and powerful algorithm have kept it ahead of the game, attracting an army of creators and influencers as well as creating many of its own.

TikTok and ByteDance employees also manually increase the number of views on certain content, according to a report in Forbes.

TikTok has said manual promotion only affects a tiny fraction of recommended videos.

Disinformation

The app is regularly accused of putting users in danger with the spread of hazardous “challenge” videos.

Several children have reportedly died while trying to replicate the so-called blackout challenge, which involves users holding their breath until they pass out.

And around one-fifth of videos on topical issues such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine were found to be fake or misleading in a study by misinformation group NewsGuard.

AFP, along with more than a dozen fact-checking organisations, is paid by TikTok in several countries in Asia and Oceania, Europe, the Middle East and Spanish-speaking Latin America to verify for internal moderation videos that potentially contain false information. The videos are removed by TikTok if the information is shown to be false by AFP teams.

AFP

American rapper, Sexyy Red, has said marriage is just “ceremonial” because of men’s cheating nature.

The ‘Rich Baby Daddy’ crooner said she would get married but would never trust her partner.

She said she is convinced that all men cheat.

Speaking in a recent interview with Angel Reese, Red said, “I’m going to get married but I think that marriage is fake. I think all men cheat.

“Even if I’m not dating, I know that men cheat. That’s why I got no hope. I’ve never met a man who doesn’t cheat.

“Even if a man tells me he won’t cheat on me, I won’t believe it. We can get married but at the end of the day, it’s just a ceremony. I don’t have faith in men.”

Nigerian songstress Tiwa Savage has finally spoken about her divorce from her ex-husband, Tunji Balogun, popularly known as TeeBillz.

DAILY POST reports that TeeBillz announced their divorce in 2018 on social media.

However, speaking in an interview with The Receipts Podcast, Tiwa Savage accused TeeBillz of being responsible for the divorce, stating that she didn’t break up with him.

She explained that TeeBillz made the announcement while she was still struggling with postpartum after the birth of their son.

She said: “The way our situation happened, he announced it online. I did not break up with him, but I was the one being attacked.

“My baby was just a few months old at that time. My body wasn’t the same because I was dealing with postpartum and depression. Only a few people came to see me. Everyone went to him.

“It got worse after I did an interview to tell my side of the story. People were like, ‘How dare you go and talk? You are a woman, and you are supposed to build the house. It’s your fault.’

“It was very heartbreaking how the public blamed me. Ever since then, I was like, ‘I won’t ever talk about the situation.’ It was an eye-opener for me. It made me depressed and angry for so long. Then I became the ‘African Bad Girl.’ I started getting tattoos and wearing bikinis and short skirts.”