[1] Toutiao is one of China's largest mobile platforms of content creation, aggregation and distribution underpinned by machine learning techniques,[1][2] with 120 million daily active users as of September 2017.

[5] In 2012 and 2013, Toutiao had two earlier rounds of funding by Susquehanna International Group (SIG) Asia Investment and Yuri Milner.

It uses machine learning systems for personalized recommendation that surfaces content which users have not necessarily signaled preference for yet.

[6] Using natural language processing and computer vision, Toutiao extracts entities and keywords as features from each piece of content.

[14] Toutiao identifies fake news by using a combination of human reviewers along with automated analysis of posts and comments.

[20] Its main research areas include Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Human-Computer Interaction.

[21] Xiaomingbot, an AI-powered robot writer co-developed by Toutiao Lab and Peking University, creates articles automatically.

[14] In October 2016, Toutiao gave India's local-language app Dailyhunt 25 million dollars in its series D funding round.

[30] On September 16, 2014, the National Copyright Administration affirmed that Toutiao had violated the copyright of traditional media outlets by crawling and serving contents from its own servers; however, the administration also noted that Toutiao has already deleted the relevant contents and started negotiating for a formal license.

[31] On December 29, 2017, the Cyberspace Administration of China accused Toutiao and Phoenix News of “disseminating pornographic and vulgar information, had serious issues of misguiding people, and had an evil influence on the ecosystem of online public discourse”,[32] listing “reposting news in violation of regulation, clickbait, and seriously disrupting the order of information flow on the network” as its main offense.

In December 2017, users noticed that the feature consistently showed them their contacts, despite not giving permission to either Toutiao or WeChat to read them.

One company, Tong Ren Tang was forced to delist its genuine products by the CFDA on December 29, 2017, due to the complaints filed by those who bought the advertised counterfeits.

[citation needed] During an interview, employees of Toutiao says that as long as one's willing to pay more advertising fee, they don't care if the product is good or not, and if the product is not certified, they'll fake one, and they'll help set up a landing page with legal content which will guide the visitor to the illegal advertisement, and find a proxy company so that when the regulators find out, they can blame the proxy.