A 24-year old mother of two children committed suicide on Thursday in Tamil Nadu after she was scolded by her husband and prevented from using the short video-making app, TikTok.
Anitha, recorded herself as she drank the poison and then sent the video via WhatsApp to her husband, who is in Singapore. According to media reports, Anitha’s husband Pazhanivel did not appreciate his wife’s TikTok addiction and had asked her to quit the habit.
In her last video, Anitha is seen drinking a dark coloured liquid from a white bottle before breaking into hysterical cough. She died soon after. The incident has attracted massive criticism online. Some news channels who published the video on YouTube have in fact, disabled comments for the video.
Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, the short video sharing platform claims to have over 120 million monthly active users in India.
This is not the first time TikTok has led to somebody’s death. Earlier in January, a Mumbai-based 15-year old hung her self at her residence on her birthday after her grandmother scolded her for constantly being hooked on TikTok. Later in April, Salman Zakir, a 19-year-old Delhi resident was accidentally shot by his friend who was trying to make a TikTok video.
After such alarming incidences, the Madras High Court passed an interim order banning mobile app citing inappropriate and pornographic content in April. Deciding the case filed by advocate Muthukumar, the bench vacated its interim order banning the app, subject to conditions that pornographic videos will not be uploaded on it, failing which contempt of court proceedings would begin.
The app was pulled down from both, Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store until April 25 — a day after the Madras High Court’s Madurai Bench lifted the ban.
