The country’s education minister, Ogerta Manastirliu, said that officials are in contact with TikTok on adding parental controls and age verification as well as the Albanian language.

Authorities undertook some 1,300 meetings with 65,000 parents who “recommended and were in favour of the shut down or limiting the TikTok platform”, the minister said.

The move was put in motion last year after one teenager stabbed another to death in November over a dispute that it was claimed began on TikTok.

The company said, however, that it had “found no evidence that the perpetrator or victim had TikTok accounts, and multiple reports have in fact confirmed videos leading up to this incident were being posted on another platform, not TikTok”.

The country’s opposition has set 15 March for a protest against the move, saying the ban was “an act of intolerance, fear and terror from free thinking and expression”.