Sangya Lakhanpal is like any other TikTok user. Every now and then, the 28-year-old opens the app, mostly to watch skin routines and DIY videos. “It’s fun,” the Mumbai-based influencer with a base of 165.1k TikTok followers, told VICE. “I’m an actor too, so I also rehearse my acting skills here. I try out different expressions and I get a lot of responses from my friends and followers. At one point, I got a little addicted to it too!” On her Instagram page, where she has 232k followers, she has a dedicated Highlights section full of #TikTok videos, in which she lip-syncs to some of the most popular Bollywood songs and comedy dialogues.

“People have careers on this app. It’s very easy to use, it’s free. You see a lot of people from all walks of life: every demographic is on it. There are evolving actors and well-known influencers too,” she said. “Once I joined, I realised its potential. I used to get offers from coordinators and agencies before I joined TikTok too. But when I started posting TikTok videos on other platforms, agencies immediately responded with, 'Hey, we didn’t know you could pull off this expression’, or 'We’re casting for this ad and we want to see this video'. It was like, those videos would connect with the right people at the right time.”

While the petition to ban TikTok has highlighted the aforementioned ill-effects, the core purpose of the app remains absent from conversations. “Platforms such as TikTok are enablers of free speech; the same applies to YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a New Delhi-based digital activist and founder of MediaNama . “The call to ban the download of the app disproportionately restricts speech of would-be users, which presumes that everything on the app or all of its users is negative, and censors their speech without any cause.”

The order has come after concerns over TikTok “ encouraging pornography ” or being “ unbearable ” and “ suggestive ”. Ever since the case started, TikTok revealed that it removed over six million videos “for violating community guidelines” (since July 2018), introduced age gates for new users “to prevent underage users from accessing the platform”, and launched a PSA that reminds “Indian users to behave responsibly during this election season”. In an official statement to VICE, TikTok said, “This is part of TikTok’s ongoing efforts to make its millions of users feel safe and comfortable within the community by empowering them with the right tools and resources,” adding that they have also launched a Safety Center to safeguard user accounts, along with enabling a ‘Digital Wellbeing’ feature, which helps users report, flag, block and delete comments.

In India, it’s become somewhat of a norm to respond to the usual conduct of the lawmakers towards digital spaces in either of the two ways: sheer anger and protest, or helpless laughter over the absurdity of it all. Exhibit A: a ban on porn sites last year (after the courts decided porn leads to rapes) has reportedly led to an increase in the consumption of porn . But in this case, many stakeholders feel it is more than a mere laughing matter, and actually a cause of concern.

TikTok is a part of a rather contentious internet space in India, which has mostly been misconstrued as negative. Its role as a positive tool has largely been ignored. “A lot of young people use digital technology to further social bonds. It would be more useful to look at how media impacts children and whether there are actual harms resulting from them,” said Apar Gupta, executive director of New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, which has put out a statement against the call for a ban. “We should then address that through a curriculum and parental intervention, to make sure that children don’t grow up to be strangers to technology. A ban will set back a large portion of India’s population from being digital natives, which is necessary for them to be meaningful participants in the society when they become adults.”

VICE reached out to several TikTok users as well, including Lakhanpal, and most of them told us how the app has helped them find their voice. “Especially for someone like me, you know,” said Mumbai-based Aarish Ansari, implying that even within the sea of mostly song and dance videos, his posts as a pro-football freestyler get a great response too. “There is genuine talent in the space, and my experience has been amazing. So many people have the opportunity to put out their talents, especially from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, and even villages.”

Akshay Yadav, a 24-year-old influencer on TikTok, admits there’s a lot of inappropriate content out there that could use some amount of policing, but not at the cost of individual talent. “I notice how there are certain people who dress a certain way to get more followers. You know, a little cleavage here or there,” he said. “With all due respect to them, it really kills me that great content sometimes gets overshadowed by these kinds of videos! But even though I agree with a ban on this kind of content, I do think it’s not nice to ban it altogether. Being an influencer, this is my platform, my audience, my job. I have videos that reach 1-2 million people. If TikTok ceases to exist, all my hard work goes.”

In a democratic and secular country such as India, any form of censorship is a highly dangerous thing. “It’s a disproportionate act of censorship,” said Pahwa. “It’s not a legitimate restriction of free speech. If you look at the argument of porn in India, viewing porn is not illegal in the country. On some level, [the TikTok ban] is also moral policing, which, again, is not constitutional.”

“Singling out TikTok doesn’t address the larger problem”