When India banned TikTok, it closed a window to the wider world for legions of women outside the big cities that provided fun, fame and even fortune.

The government outlawed the video-sharing platform, and 58 other Chinese apps, this month citing data security fears.

TikTok is also reportedly under greater scrutiny elsewhere including in the United States and Australia.

Married soon after she completed college, 27-year-old stay-at-home mother Mamta Verma lives in a small town in Madhya Pradesh state.

One day, her daughter got her to install TikTok on her phone to watch the dizzying array of zany videos uploaded from across what used to be the app's biggest international market.

Instagram and YouTube are for "the big people", Verma told AFP by phone, but TikTok she liked.

She started to record and upload videos of her own.

"I started with five likes on my first video. That was a big boost for me," Verma said.

Soon, she had more than a million followers and was earning about 4,000 rupees ($50) per video with her slick robot dance routines shot inside her small, simple home.

"It's not a lot but my earnings from TikTok helped in running the house and also in managing finances for the new house. You know even 10 rupees is a huge amount for us," she said.

- Breaking a glass ceiling -

But it wasn't just the money.

"Before TikTok, I didn't have the confidence to talk to people. I would just do my work, and as a stay-at-home wife I never made eye contact with people or even spoke much," Verma said.

Speaking a vast number of languages and dialects, around 70 percent of India's 1.3 billion people live in rural areas, a world away from big cities such as Mumbai and New Delhi.

Amitabh Kumar from Social Media Matters, a group encouraging "social media for social change", said that for many people in this huge hinterland, TikTok was a "glass ceiling breaker".

"Instead of Bollywood and rich people, finally there was a chance for common people to create something in 15 seconds which makes you laugh or cry or think or engage," he told AFP.

Its different tools were simple to use for those who don't speak or read English or Hindi, and the app worked well on low-speed internet.

"Twitter cracked the short-form storytelling in text -- with 140 and then 280 (characters). I think TikTok did it with 15 seconds," he added.

And it reminded the urban elite of India's vast diversity and chasmic differences in wealth.

"What we, people sitting in Delhi, probably judged and made fun of was high-class entertainment for a lot of people who never got a chance to express themselves," he said.

"Here was for the first time a space that rural India was enjoying."

- 'Not a big person' -

Another minor star was Rupali Manoj Bhandole, 29, a housewife and mother who left school at 14 living in a small town in Maharashtra state that gets piped water for an hour a day and endures frequent power cuts.

She would upload videos of herself poking fun at her weak economic status -- and soon amassed 300,000 followers.

"A person who works with a Marathi TV show called me a star... I can't tell you happy I felt," she told AFP.

"I only studied until Class 9. I'm not a big person."

Bhandole said she wept when TikTok was banned.

- Conservative family -

Archana Arvind Dhormise hopes the benefits she derived from the platform will last.

The 35-year-old from Pimpalgaon in Maharashtra seldom left home for fear of censure from her conservative family and neighbours.

But then the home beautician became the "Rani Mukherji of TikTok" -- a reference to a famous Bollywood actress -- dancing and miming to famous songs, and gaining 75,000 fans.

She won a local competition for one of her TikTok videos. Now she has landed a part in a short film.

"I had never in my life gone up on stage and spoken or even initiated a conversation without having a million thoughts in my head," Dhormise told AFP.

"But being on TikTok and seeing all the love I was getting gave me the confidence to keep that going, and also be confident in the real world."

Pakistan warns video-sharing app TikTok over 'immoral content'
Islamabad (AFP) July 21, 2020 - Pakistan has issued a final warning to Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to clamp down on what it called "immoral, obscene and vulgar" content on the video-sharing platform.

TikTok has become a global sensation with its 15 to 60-second video clips and is hugely popular among young Pakistanis, with some users building up millions of followers.

But the app has faced a backlash in the deeply conservative Islamic country, with critics blaming it for spreading nudity and pornography.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) announced it was blocking another app, Bigo, and had received a number of complaints about TikTok over its "extremely negative effects on the society and the youth in particular".

In a statement late Monday it said it had already issued notices to the company asking it to moderate content, before issuing a final warning ordering filters be put in place to stop "obscenity, vulgarity and immorality".

Arslan Khalid, a digital media adviser to Prime Minister Imran Khan, welcomed the decision and claimed the "exploitation, objectification & sexualization of young girls on TikTok" was causing pain to parents.

A TikTok spokesperson told AFP the platform had removed more than 3.7 million videos that violated standards in Pakistan between July 1 and December 31 last year.

"We are committed to further strengthening our safeguards to ensure the safety of our users, while increasing our dialogue with the authorities to explain our policies and demonstrate our dedication to user security", the TikTok representative said.

Nighat Dad, a lawyer who offers digital security training to women, told AFP "obscenity" complaints are vague and often aimed at women, praising the app for allowing people to express themselves in ways they often cannot in public.

The telecommunications authority also announced it was blocking the less popular Singapore-based live-streaming app Bigo Live over its content.

TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, has faced increasing controversy over how it collects and uses data although it has repeatedly denied sharing user information with Chinese authorities.

Neighbouring India banned the app, along with dozens of other Chinese mobile platforms, over national security and privacy concerns with the United States considering a similar move.

In Pakistan -- a close ally of China -- no privacy concerns have been raised.

The app was also banned by Bangladesh last year as part of a clampdown on pornography, while Indonesia briefly blocked access over blasphemy concerns.

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