Tirana, March 6— Today, the Council of Ministers adopted the draft decision “On taking temporary measures to avoid the negative impact of the TikTok platform” as a meaningful step to protect children and youth from the dangers of social media. Ogerta Manastirliu, Minister of Education and Sports, said after the government meeting, “The government has decided to temporarily close the TikTok online platform.” The government held a series of consultation meetings with parents, surveying some 65,000 parents in more than 1,300 meetings about their concerns about digital safety and the negative impact of social media platforms with uncontrolled content on children’s psycho-emotional health. “In all these meetings, parents were in favor of shutting down or restricting the TikTok platform,” Manastirliu said. The government has decided to suspend access to TikTok in Albania for a period of 12 months until the platform meets safety and age requirements for child users. The relevant authorities, in cooperation with Internet service providers and technology platforms, will take the necessary steps to implement this decision and will continuously evaluate its effectiveness. “Access to the TikTok platform has been temporarily suspended. A temporary suspension means that we have 12 months to work with TikTok representatives to develop the necessary conditions and criteria to ensure that access to TikTok does not harm children and young people. The National Agency for Cybersecurity, in cooperation with the necessary authorities, will try to implement this shutdown of TikTok access in a timely manner, possibly within a few days or a week at most,” said Minister of Education and Sports Ogerta Manastirliu. Today, the government agreed with the recommendation of an inter-institutional council to temporarily shut down the platform.