TikTok took only 5 years to reach the 1-billion monthly active user mark, a shorter period of time than many of its competitors. 

For comparison, Facebook did it in 2012. That's eight years after its launch in 2004.

Instagram reached the same number in 2018, also eight years after launching in 2010.

But TikTok’s success hasn’t been without difficulty.

The company was threatened with a ban from the Trump administration last year, citing security and data concerns, which would have pushed the app into American ownership. But President Biden abandoned these plans.

Security concerns, however, persist. For example, last week, Forbes published an article accusing TikTok of ambitions to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens.

The text also said that its unclear whether any data was actually collected. But TikTok hit back in a series of tweets claiming that the article lacks both rigor and journalistic integrity.

TikTok said Forbes “chose not to include the portion of our statement that disproved the feasibility of its core allegation: TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users, meaning TikTok could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested.”

Meanwhile, a Forbes spokesperson said: “We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting.”

John Paczkowski, executive editor of technology and innovation at Forbes, added that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, “have not denied any of the claims in the story.”

Its algorithm, which makes it easy to consume videos, has also been blamed for amplifying misinformation and other harmful content.

The US government is currently negotiating with ByteDance over concerns about national security and the safety of Americans' personal data on foreign servers. And there are ongoing concerns about the mental health harms the app may pose to teenagers and young people.

But its users seem to be happy with the app. At least for now. So TikTok continues to grow in influence.

In fact, there's a new survey from Pew Research Center that asked American adults from a range of age groups about which social media sites they get their news from, and TikTok and Instagram were the only platforms that have increased since 2020, while other sites included in the survey — Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitch, and WhatsApp — have all decreased.