(Kathmandu) From a Nepalese housewife, Anjana Aryal became an influencer by sharing her recipes on TikTok and quickly got rich. But everything came crashing down last month when the Himalayan country decided to ban the Chinese video-sharing app.
Filming with her mobile phone in one hand and cooking with the other, the young woman was catapulted into the ranks of social media stars in Nepal last year, with millions of views and nearly 600,000 subscribers.
“My life has changed a lot, a lot, thanks to TikTok,” Anjana Aryal, 39, told AFP from her home in Kathmandu.
“A lot of people recognize me from TikTok everywhere I go.”
Through endorsement deals with brands, she says she earned nearly $3,000 in October, more than double the average Nepalese annual income.
Taking advantage of her notoriety, the young woman launched her brand of marinades and was quickly inundated with orders.
But, like other content creators, when authorities banned TikTok to protect “social harmony,” following several other countries, his dream was shattered.
“People were making money, trading, or just having fun on TikTok. Everyone is affected now, and we don’t know what to do,” she explains.
Owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, TikTok is one of the most popular platforms on the planet, with more than a billion users. Its explosive growth has provided content creators and influencers with access to a huge audience, thanks to a particularly attractive artificial intelligence-based algorithm.
But its detractors accuse Tiktok of confining its users to content silos, via an opaque algorithm, and of promoting the dissemination of disinformation and illegal, violent or obscene content.
The application is also singled out by the American authorities and several European countries for its insufficient protection of Internet users’ data and is suspected of allowing Beijing to spy on, or even manipulate, users. The company has always denied these accusations.
The platform has been banned in India, neighboring Nepal, since 2020. And several countries have sought to strengthen controls on TikTok in recent months.
This surge in criticism of the application worries influencers around the world. Some, like those in Pakistan, have lost income due to recurring government restrictions on TikTok.
Others in the United States say they fear losing thousands of dollars in revenue if the planned bans are implemented.
Dozens of content creators protested in Kathmandu against the ban last month.
For lawyer Dinesh Tripathi, who is challenging the decision in court, the ban on the application constitutes an attack on freedom of expression because the government wants to silence “dissenting voices”. “The first and foremost duty of the State is to enable citizens to exercise their rights and freedoms, not to prohibit them,” he said.
Manish Adhikari, who gained his notoriety on TikTok discussing cars and start-ups, has lost several sponsorship deals since the ban. “Brands started calling me […] I wondered if I was going bankrupt, would my work stop? “, he noted. He migrated to Instagram, but only regained a fraction of his previous audience. “Now I have to start from scratch.”
Out of Nepal’s population of 30 million, around 2.2 million use TikTok, according to the Internet Service Providers Association.
