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TikTok calls itself the “destination for short-form mobile videos.” The videos are often short, averaging 15 seconds, although the platform launched 10 min videos in March 2022. Despite only becoming mainstream everywhere in 2018, TikTok was created two years before, in 2016, by the Chinese company ByteDance. Although it was initially planned to be focused only on the Chinese audience, the founder of the company, Zhang Yiming acknowledged the need for international expansion. According to him "China is home to only one-fifth of Internet users globally. If we don’t expand on a global scale, we are bound to lose to peers eyeing the four-fifths. So, going global is a must". In 2017, TikTok intelligently merged with another popular app, Musical.ly, which already allowed lip-syncing and had a rising fan base, especially amongst the younger audience, and consolidated into one app, adding the existing accounts to the platform.