Global Courant 2023-05-13 08:46:22
A former executive who was fired from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, made a series of allegations against the tech giant on Friday, including that it stole content from competitors like Instagram and Snapchat, and served as a “propaganda tool” for the Chinese government through content. to suppress or promote. to the interests of the country.
The allegations were made Friday in a complaint filed by Yintao Yu, the chief of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations from August 2017 to November 2018, as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed earlier this month in San Francisco Superior Court. Yu claims he was fired for disclosing “unlawful conduct” he witnessed at the company.
In the complaint, Yu alleges that the Chinese government monitored ByteDance’s work from its headquarters in Beijing and provided advice on how to promote “communist core values.”
Yu said government officials had the option of disabling the Chinese version of ByteDance’s apps and retaining access to all company data, including information stored in the United States.
ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The allegations come as TikTok – one of the most popular social media apps in the US – is under rigorous scrutiny in Washington and some states over its ability to protect US data from the Chinese government. The Biden administration has threatened to ban the app if the Chinese owners don’t sell their stakes.
TikTok claims it has never given US user data to the Chinese government and would not if asked. To avoid a ban, it also wants to store US user data on servers owned by software giant Oracle.
In another high profile part of the lawsuit, Yu claims he saw ByteDance promoting content expressing hatred towards Japan on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. At another point, he said the company downgraded content that showed support for the Hong Kong protests while promoting content that criticized the protests.
Yu said ByteDance developed software that would scrape user content from competitor websites without permission. He claims the company would then repost the content on its own websites — including TikTok — to attract more user engagement.
Yu said a fellow TikTok executive responsible for the video-sharing app’s algorithm brushed off his concerns. At one point, Yu said the company modified the program but continued to collect data from US users when they were abroad.
The former executive also alleges that the company created fake users to improve engagement metrics, including programming them to “like” and “follow” real accounts.
Yu is seeking damages, lost earnings and 220,000 shares of ByteDance that were not vested at the time he was fired.
