US House passes bill that could ban TikTok nationwide

TikTok claims to have 170 million users in the US – which, if correct, would mean half the country’s population has an account.

So how did the app, which appeared in 2017, grow so quickly?

Well, it had a head start. Its predecessor is Musical.ly, a social media platform where users would lip-sync to 15-second music clips. The Shanghai-based company was making big inroads in the US and had a very young user base.

By 2017, just three years after it was founded, it claimed over 60 million monthly active users.

That year, ByteDance – already a large tech company in China – bought Musical.ly for $1bn, and renamed it TikTok.

Its user numbers continued to rise. And then the pandemic came.

Millions of people flocked to the app as it offered bitesize chunks of news, explainers, viral dances and music trends.

Fuelled by a powerful algorithm which seemed to give its users exactly what they wanted, it became a key part of many peoples’ online lives.

And as with any social media app, the more of your social circle are on it, the more incentive there is to sign up yourself. That will make it very difficult for people to give up if it is taken away.