Research Briefing: What’s going on with TikTok

In this edition of the Glossy+ Research Briefing, we share a timeline of the TikTok app, from its founding in 2012 to what may come next for the app as it faces a possible ban in the U.S. 

A history of the TikTok app

• March 2012 — Internet entrepreneur Zhang Yimin founds ByteDance in China. Its first product is Toutiao, a news aggregation app.
• July 2014 — Entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Louis Yang found Musical.ly, an app for posting short lip-synching music videos, in China.
• September 2016 — ByteDance creates Douyin, a video app for Chinese users. It’s so popular that the company creates a spin-off, TikTok, for foreign users. 
• November 2017 — ByteDance acquires Musical.ly for $1 billion.
• August 2018 — ByteDance merges Musical.ly with TikTok.
• September 2018 — TikTok surpasses Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat in monthly installs on the Apple App Store and Google Play. In 2018, consumers downloaded the app more than a billion times. 
• February 2019 — Rapper Lil Nas X releases country music hit “Old Town Road” through the TikTok app. The song goes viral and lands at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 17 weeks in a row. The same month, TikTok reaches 27 million active users in the U.S. and settles federal charges for $5.7 million for violating U.S. child privacy laws. 
• September 2019 — News publication The Guardian reports on leaked internal documents that reveal TikTok’s parent company ByteDance censors videos on TikTok that don’t favor Chinese foreign policy, especially those covering controversial historical topics such as the 1998 Indonesian riots, the Cambodian genocide and the Tiananmen Square protests.  
• October 2019 — U.S. politicians call for an investigation into TikTok for its acquisition of Musical.ly and for censoring content. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States launches an investigation the following month.
• January 2020 — The Pentagon bans TikTok and any other successor application or service developed by ByteDance from all military phones including personal phones of U.S. military personnel in the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act.”
• May 2020 — In an effort to help its U.S. relations, TikTok hires former Disney executive Kevin Mayer as CEO. He resigns three months later.
• August 2020 — President Donald Trump issues an executive order banning American companies from performing any “transactions” with ByteDance and its subsidiaries. A few days later, he issues a second order demanding that ByteDance divest itself of TIkTok’s U.S. operations within 90 days. At the end of the month, TikTok sues the Trump administration for allegedly violating due process in its executive orders.
• November 2020 — Joe Biden is elected president of the U.S. Trump’s plans to force a sale of TikTok start to unravel,
• September 2021 — TikTok announces it has more than a billion active monthly users.
• December 2021 — The Wall Street Journal reports on the dangers of the TikTok algorithm which includes showing users overly personalized content and potentially exposing them to extreme viewpoints. 
• February 2022 — In response to claims the app’s algorithm pushes harmful content to users, TikTok announces updates to its community guidelines. 
• April 2022  — TikTok surpasses Instagram as the most downloaded app in the world, surpassing 70 million downloads in the Apple App Store. 
• June 2022 — TikTok announces it has migrated its user data to U.S. servers managed by U.S. tech firm Oracle. However, a Buzzfeed News report rings alarm bells when it reveals China-based employees at ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data of U.S. TikTok users. 
• December 2022 — ByteDance fires four employees who accessed personal data belonging to several U.S. TikTok users, including journalists from Buzzfeed News and The Financial Times, when the employees were attempting to locate the sources of leaks to reporters. 
• March 2023 — TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew attends a congressional hearing in an attempt to push back against allegations that TikTok and ByteDance are tools of the Chinese government.
• January 2024 — TikTok restricts some aspects of its “Creative Center,” which helps brands and advertisers see what’s trending on the app. With the new change, users are no longer allowed to search for specific hashtags, including innocuous ones.
• March 2024  — The House of Representatives passes a bill that would lead to a U.S. ban of the TikTok app if ByteDance refuses to sell it. The bill was introduced to Congress earlier in the month. 
• April 2024 — The Senate follows suit and passes the TikTok ban-or-sell bill. The bill is sent to President Joe Biden, who signs it. 
• May 2024 — TikTok sues the U.S. federal government saying the law is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment. 
• December 2024 — The DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling, agreeing with the Department of Justice that a congressional ban on TikTok can go into effect in the next few weeks.

What’s next for TikTok?

President-elect Donald Trump and his cabinet picks are divided on how to best handle the ban and platform, leaving the future of TikTok uncertain. Although Trump had previously sought to ban the app, the President has reversed his stance, now vowing to save it. That may be thanks to the success the president-elect has found on the app, having accumulated 14.6 million followers on his personal account.

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