TikTok, known in China as Douyin (Chinese: 抖音; pinyin: Dǒuyīn), is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts a variety of short-form user videos, from genres like pranks, stunts, tricks, jokes, dance, and entertainment with durations from 15 seconds to ten minutes. TikTok is an international version of Douyin, which was originally released in the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018.
TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available. The two products are similar, but features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them and other features such as buying, booking hotels and making geo-tagged reviews. Since its launch in 2016, TikTok and Douyin rapidly gained popularity in virtually all parts of the world. TikTok surpassed 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide in October 2020.Morning Consult ranked TikTok as the third fastest growing brand of 2020, after only Zoom and Peacock. Cloudflare ranked TikTok as the most popular website of 2021, surpassing Google.TikTok has been subject to criticism over psychological effects such as addiction, as well as controversies over inappropriate content, misinformation, censorship and moderation, and user privacy.
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