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As ban hangs over TikTok in U.S., Kyrgyzstan’s block isn’t going as planned [1]
['Alexander Thompson']
Date: 2025-08
A teenager in downtown Bishkek scrolls on TikTok on August 12, 2025. He uses a VPN to access the Chinese video sharing app despite Kyrgyzstan’s 16-month-old block. (Photo: Alexander Thompson/Eurasianet)
Officially, TikTok is banned in Kyrgyzstan and has been since April 2024.
But you wouldn’t know that from a glance at Zhibek’s phone.
“I use it every day,” the 19-year-old student confessed. Sometimes for as many as three hours.
While TikTok’s fate in the United States hangs in the balance as the Trump Administration has repeatedly delayed a ban, Kyrgyzstan’s 16-month-old block shows the potential pitfalls of nixing the popular short video sharing platform.
After Kyrgyz authorities ordered internet providers to block access to the app, ostensibly over concerns about the lack of age restrictions, most TikTok users quickly downloaded virtual private networks, or VPNs, allowing them to surf the web from servers in countries where TikTok is accessible.
“TikTok was only blocked on paper,” said Semetey Amanbekov, a journalist and lawyer with the advocacy group Media Action Platform. Amanbekov and other critics of the policy see it as maladroit attempt by Kyrgyz authorities to control one of the country’s most popular channels of communication.
TikTok is also inaccessible in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan while proposals to block it in Kazakhstan haven’t gone anywhere.
But the Kyrgyz ban has dented engagement on TikTok due to the inconvenience of VPNs, pushed users toward other social media platforms and taken the shine off the app that brought overnight fame to many, creators say.
“You’d get up in the morning and say, ‘Wow, so many people watched. Now I want to create more,’” recalled Adilet Nogoibaev, a travel and food blogger who is one of Kyrgyzstan’s most prominent internet personalities. “It’s the audience and the views that are very important to me as a creative person, and that’s what TikTok gave me. And it doesn’t anymore.”
About an eighth of Bishkek college students who used TikTok ditched the app after the ban, according a survey conducted online by Victoria Shchekaturova, a graduate student at the
American University of Central Asia. Among those who continued to use the TikTok, 37 percent said they spent less time on it since it was blocked, and a small fraction said they’ve used it more, she found.
Most people think the block is “pointless,” Shchekaturova said, recalling a recent taxi ride. “The driver was watching TikTok and driving the car.”
TikTok first began to gain popularity in Kyrgyzstan around 2019, which is when it caught Nogoibaev’s notice. At the time, he was a well-established YouTuber, and he decided to start posting food reviews to TikTok on the side. His account took off when the pandemic hit, and it grew further as borders reopened. Nogoibaev added travel blogging to his TikTok repertoire, and soon his videos were racking up hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes going over the million mark.
“If I’m honest, I took my focus off YouTube and moved to short videos,” he said. “In one day TikTok can make a person a star.”
By the end of 2023, nearly 70 percent of Kyrgyz nationals were using TikTok, according to a survey by M-Vector, a consulting firm.
In late August 2023, the Kyrgyz Ministry of Culture announced it was seeking to block TikTok in the country because the app “harmfully impacts” children. But for a time nothing happened, until the powerful State Committee for National Security resurrected the proposal for similar reasons in April of 2024, and the Ministry of Digital Development swiftly ordered internet providers to shut off access. The app stopped working in Kyrgyzstan on April 18, 2024.
The Ministry of Culture provided letters from more than a dozen child and family advocacy groups raising concerns about the app. Though a local media outlet, Kaktus, later discovered many of the authors didn’t know much about the app or said they didn’t write the letters, there was legitimate concern.
“As an example, a schoolboy didn’t sleep all night and watched those videos. His mom woke him up for school, and they argued. Later he tried to hit her,” Dariykan Asilbekova, a social worker, told Kaktus in August 2023. She told Eurasianet she thinks the block is working “fine” in a brief telephone conversation last month.
A lot of “shock content” was appearing on the app around the time of the ban, especially in Kyrgyz, which social media companies have more trouble flagging and removing, said Amanbekov, the media advocate. But at the time, several activists abroad were criticizing the government and calling for protests, he said.
“The authorities tried to somehow reduce the popularity of those overseas activists, because they were, for the most part, speaking out on TikTok livestreams,” Amanbekov said.
After the application was blocked, VPNs quickly became the most downloaded apps in the country, according SimilarWeb, an internet traffic analysis firm. Nonetheless, Nogoibaev noticed a modest drop in views, and since the block, his subscriber numbers have been stuck about where they were in spring of last year – 430,000.
The need to switch on a VPN may be behind the drop in views.
The VPN “sometimes causes the phone itself to break down … [and] go slower,” Adelina Adambaeva, a 22-year-old manager, said as she enjoyed lunch in downtown Bishkek. She still watches TikTok sometimes, but mostly uses Instagram and Facebook.
In a twist, number of TikTok users may still be rising as new generations log on even as engagement has stagnated. TikTok officials told members of the media last year that they were still seeing growth on the platform after the ban, Amanbekov said.
TikTok did not respond to an emailed request for comment from Eurasianet.
The benefits of the ban are nebulous to many. Inappropriate content is still easily available to children elsewhere on the internet, and it didn’t stop online government critics. For instance, in early May of this year, authorities arrested and charged a man for inciting mass disorder in part due to anti-government videos he posted on TikTok, local media reported.
A handful of deputies in the Kyrgyz parliament, the Jogorku Kenesh, have been calling on the government to unblock the application since last winter.
Dastan Bekeshev, a deputy from Bishkek who used TikTok to great effect during his own parliamentary reelection campaign in 2021, said business owners have come to him asking for the block to be rolled back after seeing engagement drop in the wake of the ban.
“It’s an advertising space where you can show your store, your café and your flower shop,” Bekeshev said. “The block really hit small and medium-sized businesses.”
He’s also concerned about the use of free VPNs that farm users’ data with little transparency.
Now, Bekeshev said, “10-year-old kids know how to use a VPN. But where did they get that VPN? Which VPN are they using? As a rule, they’re free. That’s also, of course, a big question.”
More than 90 percent of college students using TikTok accessed it with free VPNs and little knowledge of the privacy tradeoffs, Shchekaturova’s survey found.
The decision to block TikTok was made by the security committee and the Ministry of Digital Development without a vote in parliament or a court decision, meaning the decision to unblock it is theirs too. The government did not respond publicly to the MPs’ requests to unblock it earlier this year.
Nogoibaev, the travel blogger, holds out hope the government will come to see TikTok as tool to promote its own achievements and unblock the app. Videos of the mayor of Osh running through city streets to enforce the building code and a Bishkek traffic cop pulling over speeders are already hits on the app, Nogoibaev pointed out.
But any action seems unlikely in the near term, Amanbekov said.
“They need a reason, that TikTok did something so that now children can’t access it, because that was their official reason [for the block],” he said.
Zhibek, the 19-year-old student, doesn’t think the block is going anywhere. “It’s rare when laws are canceled here,” she said. But she doesn’t really mind. Her TikTok account isn’t going anywhere either.
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