Instagram is, without a doubt, the most popular social media of our time. However, the situation was widely different just a couple of years ago, when Facebook was the most popular one. People’s needs and preferences have changed during that time, which caused so many people to focus on Instagram. There are so many different accounts that have managed to attract a serious number of followers.
Mainly, we are talking about celebrity accounts. That doesn’t mean that common people cannot do that. We can see that there’s an option to buy followers. If you would like to take a look at how this can be done, be sure to take a look at famousfollower.com. Many people presume that most of the users come from the United States.
Yet, we can see that India has an equal number of Instagram users as the US. Both of these countries have 140 million users. These two are followed by Brazil, Indonesia, and Russia. With its 1.3 billion population, we can see that this app has a lot of potential in this country. For example, many people don’t know that this app, along with many other ones, is banned in the country with the highest number of populations in the world, China.
However, we can see that recent activities in India have left some of the people outside the country in the dark.
Therefore, we would like to shine a light on this situation.
What Happened in India?
Back in 2024, some sources from India stated that the country plans to completely ban Instagram, Facebook, and 87 more apps. However, this information wasn’t as accurate as many thought at first. Basically, it happened that the Indian army directed all the army personnel to delete all these apps from their mobile devices. The members of the army were given a deadline until the 15th of July to remove all of these from their devices.
It is interesting to know that this isn’t the first time for the Indian army to conduct an operation like this. There were some bans towards the usage of Facebook-owned applications. A couple of years ago, members of the army were ordered to use their WhatsApp solely for official work. In February, the information about the removal of Instagram and other apps from army personnel in this country was confirmed. Along with that one, the whole learned that the operation ended in success.
Is Instagram Banned?
After this happened, it created a lot of confusion among people online. We can see that India’s citizens were uncertain about them having an Instagram account is now considered illegal. However, the government confirmed that these limitations are imposed only on members of the army. Allegedly, the reason why this happened was the recent problems between India and China on the border of these two countries. Surely, you have seen some of that in the news. Therefore, the government imposed these limitations for security reasons.
The Rise of Instagram in India
Before all the negative talks about this app being limited in India, we can see that it managed to reach a significant number of users. The main reason it happened is the government’s decision about banning TikTok completely. Before this decision, this country was the place with the second-highest users of TikTok in the world. Only in 2019, there were 323 million downloads, which represented 44% of all downloads in the world.
In the statement that was given after the ban, the government said that it represents a threat to integrity and sovereignty for their country. Of course, this decision can be tied with all the tensions and the border with their neighboring country, China. After this decision, we can see that the United States government is thinking about doing the same thing.
However, it needs to be said that TikTok wasn’t the only app that was banned in India. There were around 60 of them, the most prominent ones being TikTok, Vigo Video, and Helo. With so much of them banned, we can see that it represented a pretty big blow to the Chinese companies. Only TikTok lost around $6 billion as a result of this ban. We will see if this is something that will be able to change in the future.
Instagram Music Available in India
Despite all the bad news we have heard about Instagram and India, we can see that there is some positive news. Instagram users in this country are now able to use Instagram music. For those who don’t know much about it, this was an option provided only to the users in a couple of markets. Also, we can see that many people are not certain about what it means to use Instagram music. We are talking about the option of using music in the background of stories they post from their accounts.
There’s an option, called “music” near stickers. When the user clicks on it, there are three different options to choose from. You will be able to choose between popular music, which includes all the most popular songs in the world. The next option is called moods, and it offers us to choose from much different music solely based on moods, like romantic, rainy, dreamy, fun, etc. Last but not least, you will have the option to choose an option called genre, where you will be able to choose between all the most popular genres like hip-hop, RnB, Hindi, heavy-metal, rock, Latin, etc.
In Conclusion
We can see that the recent tensions between India and China have resulted in much more than just a conflict on the border. Their fight transferred to the usage of apps in their respective countries. Thankfully, we can see that these tensions are somewhat easier than they were and we hope they will better in the future. When it comes to Instagram, we can see that this highly popular app isn’t banned. In fact, only army personnel are not able to use it for security reasons, which was caused by the tensions with their neighboring country.