On 3 August 2020, US President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok in the United States on 15 September if negotiations for the company to be bought by Microsoft or a different 'very American' company fail. Previously, he was chairman of Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer & International. As of April 2020, Douyin has around 500 million monthly active users.In June 2020, Kevin Mayer became CEO of TikTok and COO of parent company ByteDance, but he resigned on August 27, just four months into the job.

As of August 2020, TikTok, excluding Douyin, has surpassed 1 billion users worldwide in less than four years. Since its launch in 2016, TikTok/Douyin rapidly gained popularity in East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the United States, Turkey, Russia, and other parts of the world. In addition to the ByteDance headquarters in Beijing, TikTok also has global offices, including in Dublin, Los Angeles, New York City, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available. TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. Later, TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China however, it only became available worldwide, including the United States, after merging with another Chinese social media service Musical.ly on 2 August 2018. ByteDance first launched Douyin for the Chinese market in September 2016. It is used to create short music, lip-sync, dance, comedy and talent videos of 3 to 15 seconds, and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. TikTok, known in China as Douyin (Chinese: 抖音 pinyin: Dǒuyīn), is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based Internet technology company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming.

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