Be presented by the end of May,” a Runet source close to the company said.
Short video services gained popularity in the form of the Stories format, which was first launched in 2011 in the Snapchat messenger. Then a similar format was implemented in 2016 in Instagram.
The services received a second wave of popularity thanks to TikTok, launched in 2016 by China's ByteDance. In November 2017, the company acquired the Musical.ly service for about $1 billion and merged it with TikTok in 2018. As of July 2021, the number of albania whatsapp number list monthly users of the platform exceeded 1 billion.
In September 2020, then-US President Donald Trump decided to block TikTok in the country. US authorities accused the social network of transferring American user data to Chinese authorities. American Oracle and Walmart were supposed to acquire a stake in TikTok so that the social network could continue operating in the US. However, in February 2021, Joe Biden froze the deal, and in June 2021, he rescinded Trump's order banning TikTok.
In Russia, TikTok has also been surrounded by a number of major scandals. In January 2021, the Prosecutor General's Office demanded that the social network remove materials calling on minors to take part in protests in support of Alexei Navalny. TikTok moderators were able to block only 38% of videos calling for protests. Roskomnadzor has also repeatedly issued fines to the service for failing to remove information banned in Russia: the last one was for 4.1 million rubles, which the service paid in full.
According to Mediascope, TikTok's monthly audience in Russia reached 65.8 million people in January of this year. On average, 31.7 million Russians visited the app per day.
On March 6, TikTok announced that it was suspending operations in Russia. The company restricted the uploading of new content and access to live broadcasts for Russian users due to amendments to the "Fake Law" adopted two days earlier. TikTok said that it was studying the security implications of the law.