Albania plans year-long ban of TikTok after fatal stabbing of teen

Albania plans to ban access to the Chinese video-sharing app TikTok for one year, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced on Saturday.

The platform, owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance company, is to be blocked in six to eight weeks after the necessary technical preparations have been made, he said in the capital Tirana.

Rama said the content that TikTok offers in China is completely different from what it distributes abroad. "There is only filth and dirt there," he said, according to the state-run news agency ATA.

In particular, young people and children are endangered and "taken hostage" by the platform, he added.

Discussions about the possible harmful effects of TikTok reached a head in Albania after a 14-year-old student was stabbed to death in a fight between two groups last month.

The two groups had arranged to meet for the ultimately fatal brawl after antagonizing each other on TikTok.

It is not yet clear how the TikTok ban is to be implemented. In countries where certain content is blocked, people often find loopholes to bypass bans, resorting for example to virtual private networks (VPNs), which can make it appear as if a user is in a different country.