TikTok goes global

TikTok is a social media application that can be downloaded for free by users of any age. It allows its users to create content, watch, and share videos with others at no cost. TikTok was first launched in 2016 by the Chinese tech company ByteDance. Remarkably, by the end of 2017, TikTok was already being downloaded more actively than its competitors, such as Instagram (which took six years to gain popularity) and Facebook (which took four years). Today, TikTok has offices in cities such as Beijing, Los Angeles, Moscow, India, South Korea, and Japan. Despite having faced bans in countries such as Bangladesh and United States of America, TikTok remains one of the most popular and widely used applications. The following statistics were gathered as of February 2025. A global report in February 2025 ranked TikTok as the fourth most-used platform, after Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram, with 1.59 billion users aged 18 and above. The gender distribution was nearly balanced, with 30.8% male users and 24.3% female users. Data from March 2025 indicated that TikTok had 2.28 billion visits globally per month, with 65% of access coming from mobile devices.