The Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, announced this Saturday the beginning of preparations for suspend access to the audiovisual content platform TikTok for one year for child safety reasons. “TikTok has become the neighborhood street bully, the one we fear when our children hang out with him when they leave the house to play,” the prime minister declared in a press conference reported by the Albanian portal ‘Panorama’.
Rama has announced that the closure will take place for a year when preparations for its suspension have been completed, which will last between six and eight weeks from now. “There will be no TikTok in the Republic of Albania and we will dedicate that year to studying how other countries react, how TikTok reacts and what new technologies appear to filter content,” he added.
The Government of Albania has taken this decision following the murder in mid-November of a 14-year-old student from a well-known school in the country’s capital, Tirana, which has sparked an intense debate in the Albanian Parliament about violence in schools and its relationship with social networks.
The suspension project also takes place at a time when the platform has acquired enormous importance as a political tool as, for example, what happened in the elections in Romania has shown, where the semi-unknown ultranationalist presidential candidate Calin Georgescu achieved a surprising victory thanks to a covert campaign on TikTok.
Romania’s Constitutional Court ended up annulling the elections after accusations of Russian manipulation in favor of Georgescu, which the candidate immediately denied. This week, the European Commission began a sanctioning file against TikTok for not taking the measures required by community regulations to “adequately assess and mitigate” the risks of foreign interference in the electoral process in Romania.
