Thousands of pages of sealed court documents related to ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, were accidentally made public in Pennsylvania this week, shedding light on the social media giant’s origins, The New York Times reported Thursday. The documents were quickly resealed after the Times sought comment on them, but not before reporters discovered a trove of new information about the Chinese tech company. The Times reported that the documents showed that ByteDance’s origins went back to 2012, when 99Fang’s CEO Zhang Yiming sketched out the idea on a napkin and suggested they stop focusing on a real estate app which mines data to match houses with a user base, but instead do it with lifestyle content. Zhang tested his idea with a pair of prototype apps that matched people with “Funny Pictures and Pretty Babes,” the Times reported, adding that both were “a hit.” The success of those apps eventually led to the creation of TikTok, which, along with its addicting algorithm that keeps people scrolling, has become the equally polarizing and popular social network it is today. The hoards of data taken by TikTok to fuel its algorithm has raised national security concerns for the United States, however, which has Congress debating bills that could see TikTok banned from the U.S.—or force ByteDance to sell the social network.
