Audiovisual content platform This Monday, TikTok demanded that the Albanian government “urgently clarify the situation.” announcement that preparations are underway to suspend access to the platform in 2025, citing child safety concerns following the murder in November of a fourteen-year-old school student in the capital Tirana.

“We ask the Albanian government to urgently clarify the situation. Regarding the tragic incident mentioned, We found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts. and multiple reports have indeed confirmed that the videos that led to this incident were posted on a platform other than TikTok,” the platform said in a statement provided by Europe Press.

The statement was issued two days after the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama confirms preparations for suspension of access to the platform and will argue that “TikTok has become the street bully that we fear when our kids hang out with it, when they go out of the house to play.”

Rama stated that preparations for the suspension would take six to eight weeks and stated that “There will be no TikTok in the Republic of Albania.” “We will spend this year studying how other countries react, how TikTok reacts and what new technologies are emerging to filter content,” he said, amid a debate in the Albanian parliament about violence in schools and its connection to social media.

He announced this on Sunday on his social network account. The ban “is not a hasty response to an isolated incident, But this is a carefully considered decision made after consultation with parent communities in schools across the country,” while emphasizing that “TikTok has no reason to demand clarification from Albania.”

“Either TikTok will protect Albania’s children, or Albania will protect its children from TikTok,” he said, arguing that “the claim that the teenager’s murder has nothing to do with TikTok because the conflict did not originate on the platform demonstrates a lack of understanding of the seriousness of the threat” it poses to today’s youth.

(Europe Press)