A former govt fired from TikTok’s guardian firm ByteDance made a raft of accusations towards the tech large Friday, together with that it stole content material from rivals like Instagram and Snapchat, and served as a “propaganda software” for the Chinese language authorities by suppressing or selling content material favorable to the nation’s pursuits.
The allegations had been made in a grievance Friday by Yintao Yu, the top of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations from August 2017 to November 2018, as a part of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed earlier this month in San Francisco Superior Courtroom. Yu claims he was fired for disclosing “wrongful conduct” he noticed on the firm.
Within the grievance, Yu alleges the Chinese language authorities monitored ByteDance’s work from inside its Beijing headquarters and offered steering on advancing “core communist values.”
Yu mentioned authorities officers had the power to show off the Chinese language model of ByteDance’s apps, and maintained entry to all firm information, together with info saved in the USA.
ByteDance didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The allegations come as TikTok – one of the crucial widespread social media apps within the U.S. — faces heighted scrutiny in Washington and a few states about whether or not it could hold American information protected from the Chinese language authorities. The Biden administration has threatened to ban the app if its Chinese language house owners don’t promote their stakes.
TikTok maintains it by no means gave U.S. consumer information to China’s authorities and wouldn’t achieve this if it was requested. In an effort to keep away from a ban, it additionally needs to retailer U.S. consumer information on servers operated by the software program large Oracle.
In one other attention-grabbing a part of the lawsuit, Yu alleges he noticed ByteDance selling content material that expressed hatred for Japan on Douyin, the Chinese language model of TikTok. At one other time, he mentioned the corporate demoted content material that confirmed help for the protests in Hong Kong whereas selling content material that expressed criticism of the protests.
Yu mentioned ByteDance developed software program that may scrape consumer content material from rivals’ web sites with out permission. He alleges the corporate would then repost the content material by itself web sites – together with TikTok – to draw extra engagement from customers.
Yu mentioned a fellow TikTok govt answerable for the video-sharing app’s algorithm waved off his considerations. In some unspecified time in the future, Yu mentioned the corporate modified this system, however continued to scrape information from U.S. customers once they had been overseas.
The previous govt additionally alleges the corporate created pretend customers to spice up its engagement metrics, together with by programming them to “like” and “comply with” actual accounts.
Yu is in search of punitive harm, misplaced earnings and 220,000 ByteDance shares that had not vested by the point he was fired.
