SHANGHAI/SEOUL - Some K-pop stars' accounts have been blocked from view on TikTok's China version Douyin, Reuters' checks showed on Friday , days after South Korea's media regulator slapped fines on the short-video app for data privacy non-compliance.
South Korea's communications regulator on Wednesday fined TikTok Pte Ltd, the publisher of the app, 186 million won for collecting personal information of children under 14 years of age without consent from guardians and failing to disclose or notify when sending personal information overseas. Accounts of K-Pop stars such as Rain, Twice, Mamamoo and HyunA were blocked from view on Douyin as of Friday.
Representatives for Douyin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. TikTok and Douyin are both owned by Chinese company ByteDance.China accumulated 196.6 million downloads of Douyin as of the first quarter of 2020, or 9.7 per cent of more than two billion TikTok downloads in total, according to data from industry site Sensor Tower.