TikTok

Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance in Beijing in 2012, initially building a news aggregation app called Toutiao — "Today's Headlines" — that used machine learning to personalise content without requiring users to select their interests. The algorithm learned what each individual user wanted to see faster than any human editor could. Toutiao reached 13 million users in 90 days. Zhang had discovered something that would define the next decade of social media: the algorithm was better at predicting human attention than humans were.

ByteDance launched TikTok internationally in 2017, then acquired Musical.ly — a lip-sync app popular with Western teenagers — for $1 billion in 2018 and merged it into TikTok. The acquisition instantly gave TikTok 100 million existing Western users and a viral content format. TikTok grew faster than any social platform in history, reaching 1 billion monthly active users by 2021.

In August 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump signed executive orders attempting to ban TikTok, citing national security concerns about Chinese access to American user data. Courts blocked the ban. TikTok continued operating. Four years later, the threat would return — with more legal force.

In January 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld legislation requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations or face a ban. On January 18, TikTok went dark in America for approximately 12 hours. On his inauguration day, January 20, President Trump signed an executive order delaying enforcement — the same man who had tried to ban TikTok in his first term was now saving it. He extended the delay three more times through 2025.

In December 2025, ByteDance signed a deal backed by President Trump to divest TikTok's U.S. operations into a new joint venture — TikTok USDS — majority-owned by American investors including Oracle and Silver Lake. The deal formally closed on January 22, 2026. ByteDance retained a minority stake and licensed its algorithm to the U.S. entity. TikTok remained available to 170 million American users. The most consequential national security battle over a social media platform in history had ended with a corporate restructuring that satisfied almost nobody — and kept TikTok running anyway.