With her dark hair in a high ponytail and a rose-colored blush covering her nose and cheeks, a 23-year-old Bella Poarch takes a zoomed-in video lip-syncing to the tunes of “M to the B,” a viral rap by a British artist Millie B.
Posted in August 2020, this 10-second TikTok racked up millions of views on the app, and Bella Poarch skyrocketed to fame in a matter of days. Now, with 15.6 million likes and more than 150 million views, “M-to-the-B” is the most liked TikTok ever.
“TikTok is like magic but you never know which spell will work,” says Irine, a 18-year old regular user of the app.
TikTok was created by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and was first released in 2016 under the name “Douyin,” which was marketed as a video-sharing service similar to Facebook and Instagram (both of which are banned in China). The app then merged with a popular social media platform called Musical.ly, which allowed users to create and share short 15-second lip-sync videos. Finally, in August 2018, ByteDance released the global version of Douyin, TikTok, available for iOS and Android.
