Five TikTok “Influencers” in the Indian city of Mumbai were arrested on Monday night by local police for allegedly making inflammatory videos in order to incite communal hatred.
The cyber division of the Mumbai Police has registered a case against the persons involved for allegedly making a video in which they called to avenge the recent death of a Muslim man, who was lynched while purportedly trying to steal a motorbike in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand last month.
In a now-deleted video, the influencers could be seen shouting in Hindi “You have killed Tabrez (lynched Muslim man), tomorrow when his son takes revenge of his death, then do not refer to all Muslims as terrorists”. However before the video was deleted by the user, it was shared all over social media and soon the local police took cognizance of the matter.
“As this ‘hate-mongering’ video can disturb the peace between the two communities and lead to possible communal tension, we have registered an case against the TikTok account user which was used to post the video”, a senior Mumbai Police official was quoted as saying to India Today.
A controversy has meanwhile erupted after a section of the Twitterati alleged that the accused men were working with Zee Music Company, a leading music label in India.
The Zee Music Company was quick to respond to the allegations stating that the video of the accused men have been removed and further reassuring that the men are not Zee Music’s artists.
TikTok, an iOS and Android media app allowing users to create and share short videos, is widely popular in India and its videos often go viral on social media. Some lucky TikTok users have shot to fame and even managed to bag contracts with labels, such as T-Series.
Recently, Indian nurses in the state of Odisha created a huge uproar by uploading videos to TikTok of them dancing in an infant intensive care unit of a district hospital.