ByteDance Ltd. () is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing social networking services and apps TikTok and Chinese-specific counterpart Douyin. The company is also the developer of the news platform Toutiao. As of June 2021, ByteDance hosts 1.9 billion monthly active users across all of its platforms. ByteDance has attracted legislative, regulatory, and media attention in several countries over surveillance, privacy, and censorship concerns. History Background In 2009, software engineer and entrepreneur Zhang Yiming collaborated with his friend Liang Rubo to co-found 99fang.com, a real estate search engine. In early 2012, the pair rented an apartment in Zhongguancun and, along with several other 99fang employees, began developing an app that would use big data algorithms to classify news according to users' preferences, which would later become Toutiao. That March, Yiming and Liang founded ByteDance. Launch of first apps In March 2012, ByteDance launched its first app, called Neihan Duanzi (, lit. "profound gags"). This allowed users to circulate jokes, memes, and humorous videos. Before being forced by the Chinese government to shut down in 2018, Neihan Duanzi had over 200 million users. In August 2012, ByteDance launched the first version of news and content platform Toutiao (头条, lit. "headlines"), which would become their core product. Expansion In March 2016, ByteDance established its research arm, called the ByteDance AI Lab. It is headed by Wei-Ying Ma, the former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia. The same year, the ByteDance AI Lab and Peking University co-developed Xiaomingbot (), an AI bot that wrote news articles. From late 2016 until 2017, ByteDance made a number of acquisitions and new product launches. In December 2016, it invested in the Indonesian news recommendation platform BABE. Two months later, in February 2017, it acquired Flipagram, which was later merged with Musical.ly into TikTok upon the latter's acquisition in November 2017. Other notable acquisitions include the UGC short video platform Hypstar (Vigo Video) in July 2017, and News Republic from Cheetah Mobile in November 2017. In December 2018, ByteDance sued Chinese technology news site Huxiu for defamation after Huxiu reported that ByteDance's Indian-language news app Helo was propagating fake news. In March 2021, the Financial Times reported that ByteDance was part of a group of Chinese companies that aimed to deploy