President Joe Biden received his COVID-19 booster shot on Monday, days after federal regulators recommended a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine for Americans age 65 or older and approved them for others with preexisting medical conditions and high-risk work environments.
TikTok hit 1 billion monthly active users globally this summer, the short-video sharing app said on Monday.
It marks a 45% jump in users in just over a year.
Tiktok, which was launched four years ago by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, saw a boost in followers amid coronavirus lockdowns, school closures and home office.
The video platform, known as Douyin in China, gained more than 300 million users since July 2020, the last time the company had reported user numbers.
How is Tiktok boosting its popularity?Tiktok is known for its viral choreographies to pop songs. The platform extended its video time limit of 15 seconds to three minutes in early July to attract a wider audience and compete with YouTube.
The company also enhanced advertising last year and launched a new feature in late August 2021 that allows its users to directly purchase products offered on the video platform by content creators. It now plans to monetize more of its platform's traffic.
Tiktok said the United States, Europe, Brazil and Southeast Asia are its biggest markets, despite regulatory scrutiny it is facing in the US and other countries.
Earlier this year, the company appointed ByteDance's CFO Shouzi Chew, a Singaporean national, as its new chief executive officer.
mvb/rt (Reuters, AFP, dpa)
Pakistan is home to at least 12 groups designated as 'foreign terrorist organisations', including five of them being India-centric like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, according to a latest Congressional report on terrorism.
China on Monday defended its visa curbs which have prevented thousands of stranded Indians from returning to Beijing, saying they are "scientific, professional and appropriate" to control the spread of COVID-19 and do not target India alone, but are applied to even Chinese citizens coming back from overseas.