TikTok

• 1. Introduction

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  TikTok was launched into the international market in September 2017, but the question of who actually controls it has never been fully settled. Within three years, the app had crossed two billion downloads worldwide. Within four years, it had a billion active users, reaching that milestone faster than Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube ever had. What made a short-video app from a Beijing-based parent company grow into one of the planet's most-watched platforms? And why did that same growth make governments from India to the United States treat it as a potential national security threat? The answers lie in a story that runs from a Shanghai startup acquired for nearly a billion dollars, through congressional hearings and leaked audio recordings, to a January 2026 joint venture that reshaped who owns the app Americans open 17 times a day.

• 2. From Douyin to the World

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  Douyin launched on the 20th of September 2016, built in under seven months by ByteDance, initially under the name A.me before being renamed in December of that year. Within twelve months it had attracted 100 million users, with more than one billion videos watched every day on the platform. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming framed the international push in stark terms: "China is home to only one-fifth of Internet users globally. If we don't expand on a global scale, we are bound to lose to peers eyeing the four-fifths."

  To reach those four-fifths, ByteDance spent nearly $1 billion on the 9th of November 2017 to acquire Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based startup with an overseas office in Santa Monica. Musical.ly had been released in August 2014 and had built its audience around short lip-sync and comedy clips. On the 2nd of August 2018, TikTok merged with Musical.ly, absorbing existing accounts and data into a single app under the TikTok name. By October 2018, TikTok was the most-downloaded app in the United States.

  In 2019, media outlets ranked TikTok the seventh-most-downloaded mobile app of the entire decade from 2010 to 2019. It had also topped Apple's App Store in both 2018 and 2019, surpassing Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. That download momentum translated quickly into advertising interest: by 2021, TikTok earned $4 billion in advertising revenue, and estimates from research group Insider Intelligence projected $14.15 billion in revenue for 2023, up from $9.89 billion the year before.

• 3. The Algorithm and Its Features

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  The New York Times identified TikTok's recommendation engine in 2020 as one of the most advanced for shaping user experiences on any social platform. Where other networks weight active signals like likes, follows, and clicks, TikTok monitors a wider range of behaviors during video viewing and feeds those observations back into what it shows next. The Wall Street Journal noted in 2021 that this gave TikTok an edge over competitors in reading users' preferences and emotional states.

  At the center of the experience is the "For You" page, a continuous feed of recommended videos curated by the platform's systems based on what a user has liked, interacted with, or searched. The contrast with conventional social networks is deliberate: rather than routing content through a user's existing relationships, TikTok surfaces material from creators the viewer has never encountered.

  The platform's feature set grew steadily after the Musical.ly merger. The duet feature, which Musical.ly had pioneered, lets users film a video alongside an existing one. The stitch feature lets users incorporate clips from other videos. Live broadcasts became available to accounts with at least 1,000 followers and users over 16; those over 18 can receive virtual gifts from followers that can later be exchanged for real money. In January 2019, TikTok allowed creators to embed merchandise sale links directly into their videos. A tipping feature launched in October 2021, letting eligible accounts with at least 100,000 followers accept payments starting from $1.

  In January 2023, Forbes reported a less-publicized tool called "heating," which allows TikTok employees to manually promote specific videos. The practice originally served to grow and diversify content the algorithm failed to surface automatically, and was used for brands, artists, and organizations including FIFA's World Cup and Taylor Swift. Some employees were found to have used it to promote their own accounts or those of family members. TikTok said only a small number of individuals could approve heating in the US, and that promoted videos accounted for less than 0.002% of user feeds.

• 4. Culture, Music, and Viral Moments

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  Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" became one of the biggest songs of 2019 partly through TikTok, eventually setting the record as the longest-running number-one song in the history of the US Billboard Hot 100. The platform has repeatedly resurrected older music for new audiences: in 2020, Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 after 43 years when a skating video went viral, and the song topped Apple Music charts. In 2022, Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" topped the UK singles chart 37 years after its original release, driven by fans of the television series Stranger Things sharing it on TikTok.

  Fitz and the Tantrums had never toured in Asia when TikTok popularity of their 2016 song "HandClap" built them a substantial following in South Korea. Korean R&B and rap artist Zico reached number one on the Korean music charts through the #anysongchallenge, in which users danced to the choreography of his song "Any Song."

  On the 10th of August 2020, a user named Emily Jacobssen wrote and performed a song called "Ode to Remy," praising the protagonist of Pixar's 2007 film Ratatouille. Musician Daniel Mertzlufft composed a backing track, and TikTok users collectively built what became known as Ratatouille the Musical, adding costume design, additional songs, and a playbill. On the 1st of January 2021, a full one-hour virtual performance premiered on TodayTix, starring Titus Burgess, Wayne Brady, Adam Lambert, Kevin Chamberlin, Andrew Barth Feldman, Ashley Park, Priscilla Lopez, Mary Testa, and Andre De Shields.

  Not all trends carried the same spirit. A phenomenon called "devious licks" involved students vandalizing or stealing school property and posting the footage, leading to real arrests and school countermeasures. The Kia Challenge, which involved stealing certain Kia and Hyundai models manufactured without immobilizers between 2010 and 2021, had resulted in at least 14 crashes and eight deaths as of February 2023, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Kia and Hyundai later settled a $200 million class-action lawsuit by agreeing to provide software updates and more than 26,000 steering wheel locks.

• 5. Privacy, Security, and Project Texas

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  In June 2022, BuzzFeed News reported on leaked audio recordings of internal TikTok meetings that revealed employees in China had access to overseas user data, including a "master admin" described as being able to see "everything." Some of those recordings were made during consultations with Booz Allen Hamilton, a US government contractor. Following the reports, TikTok confirmed that employees in China could have access to US data and announced that US user traffic would be routed through Oracle Cloud, with backup copies to be deleted from other servers.

  The underlying legal concern centered on China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires all organizations and citizens to support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts. Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies stated that TikTok would have no right to appeal requests for data made by the Chinese government. A 2024 unclassified threat assessment by the Director of National Intelligence said TikTok accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm had reportedly targeted candidates during the 2022 United States elections.

  TikTok's internal response was a project called Project Texas, designed to silo privileged US user data under oversight from the US government or a third party, with Oracle assigned to review and spot-check data flows. A subsidiary called TikTok US Data Security Inc. was created to manage user data, software code, back-end systems, and content moderation; it would report to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States rather than to ByteDance or TikTok. In June 2023, TikTok confirmed that financial information including tax forms and Social Security numbers belonging to American content creators was being stored in China, applying to those who had signed contracts with and received payments from ByteDance.

  A former employee said in March 2023 that Project Texas did not go far enough and that complete re-engineering would be required. TikTok responded that Project Texas already constituted such a re-engineering and that the former employee had left in 2022 before specifications were finalized.

• 6. Bans, Divestiture, and the 2026 Deal

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  Since at least 2020, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States had been investigating TikTok's 2017 merger with Musical.ly without finalizing any negotiations. A law passed by Congress required a sale or ban of TikTok in the US by the 19th of January 2025, and the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality. In January 2025, Chinese officials began preliminary talks about potentially selling the US operations to Elon Musk's platform X if a ban became imminent. Other potential buyers included a consortium called "The People's Bid for TikTok," organized by Frank McCourt and Kevin O'Leary, as well as Steven Mnuchin, the creator MrBeast, and Bobby Kotick. On the day before the deadline, Perplexity AI also submitted a bid for a merger with TikTok's US operations.

  On the 14th of September 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US and China had reached the framework of a deal for the US operations to be sold to a consortium that included Oracle, led by Larry Ellison. The deal closed by the 22nd of January 2026. A new entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC was formed, with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX Fund Management each holding a 15% stake. ByteDance retained 19.9%. Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell and an entity called Vastmere Strategic Investments together held a combined 35.1% share. Adam Presser, previously TikTok's head of operations and trust and safety, became CEO of the new venture; Shou Zi Chew became a director. Under the terms, the app would remain the same for users, while its algorithm would be adjusted over time to favor American topics for American users.

• 7. Safety, Content, and Ongoing Controversies

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  On the 22nd of January 2021, the Italian Data Protection Authority ordered TikTok to temporarily suspend Italian users whose age could not be confirmed, following the death of a 10-year-old Sicilian girl linked to an internet challenge. By May of that year, more than 500,000 accounts in Italy had been removed after failing an age verification check. In March 2024, the Italian Competition Authority fined TikTok 10 million euros for failing to protect underage users from harmful content. On the 30th of December 2024, Venezuela's Supreme Court fined TikTok $10 million over viral challenges that authorities said had led to the deaths of three children.

  The platform's relationship with music rights has also generated friction. After a dispute over artist payouts and AI-generated music regulation, Universal Music Group declined to renew its licensing agreement, causing its catalogue of 3 million recordings to become unavailable after 2024. In March 2024, Universal Music Publishing Group separately removed its catalogue of 4 million compositions. Taylor Swift's music returned to the platform in April 2024. TikTok Music, a streaming service launched in July 2023, was discontinued in November 2024.

  Misinformation has been a persistent challenge. By June 2020, hashtags associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory had reached nearly 80 million views, and a Pizzagate hashtag had approached 50 million views. A September 2022 analysis by NewsGuard Technologies found that 19.4% of TikTok search results in the US surfaced misinformation on topics including COVID-19 vaccines, the 2020 US elections, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Robb Elementary School shooting, and abortion. Before Moldova's 2025 parliamentary election, TikTok removed over 134,000 fake accounts, nearly 2 million fake followers, and more than 9,300 videos that violated its rules on civic integrity and disinformation, while also dismantling five coordinated networks with at least 7,593 accounts promoting pro-Russian politicians.