TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based internet technology company. It is used to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy and talent videos.  TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of China; however, it only became available in the United States after merging with Musical.ly on 2 August 2018. TikTok and Douyin are similar to each other, but run on separate servers and have different content to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions.