Taliban will ban TikTok, PUBG in Afghanistan, along with other ‘immoral material’

The Taliban has ordered a ban on video-sharing app TikTok and online multi-player game PUBG, insisting they were leading Afghan youths “astray.”

PUBG, which is short for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is an online shooting game created by a South Korean developer. The militant group said it would also ban TV channels from airing what it deemed as “immoral material.”

The move was announced on Thursday in a tweet published by Taliban spokesman Inamullah Samangani, who said the decision was made at the discretion of The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. It remains unclear when the ban will go into effect and whether or not it’s permanent.

Samangani said the bans help “prevent as much as possible the publication of a channel that publishes immoral material and programs.”

Samangani told Bloomberg that TikTok, which operates under Chinese company ByteDance, includes “filthy content not consistent with Islamic laws.”

“We’ve received a lot of complaints about how the TikTok app and the PUBG game are wasting people’s time,” he added. “The ministry of communications and information technology was ordered to remove the apps from internet servers and make them inaccessible to everyone in Afghanistan.”

The number of citizens who have internet access in Afghanistan has grown rapidly in recent years along with a younger population. There are approximately 9 million people who have access to the internet in Afghanistan. Nearly two-thirds of the country’s population of 39 million are aged 25 and below.

The ban was announced on Thursday, the same day as when four separate explosions tore through cities across Afghanistan, including at a Shia mosque in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

At least 31 people were killed and 87 wounded. The Islamic State group has admitted to carrying out the attack.