2023-05-13 05:53:00
The logo of the Chinese video sharing platform ‘TikTok’ is displayed on the screen of a mobile phone. Getty Images
A former executive who was fired from ByteDance, the parent company of Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok, has revealed that the Chinese government used the company as a “propaganda tool” by exercising access to internal company data.
Foreign media such as the Associated Press reported on the 12th (local time) that Yu Yintao, a former executive at Byte Dance, made this claim. Yintao Yu served as the head of engineering for ByteDance’s US division from August 2017 to November 2018. Earlier this month, he filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against ByteDance in the San Francisco District Court, claiming he was fired for exposing misconduct at the company.
Yu Yintao said in a further opinion filed with the San Francisco District Court on Monday that the Chinese government used ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters to oversee the business and provided guidelines for advancing “core communist values.” He also said that the Chinese government had the right to shut down ByteDance applications in China at will, and also had access to ByteDance data in the United States and around the world.
Yuintao’s claim draws attention as security threats to TikTok spread in the United States. Concerns have been raised in US politics that the Chinese government could misuse the information of TikTok users in the US. The Joe Biden administration warned Chinese founders of TikTok that they could be banned from using TikTok in the United States unless they sold their stake in TikTok to US capital.
Yu Yintao then claimed to have witnessed the company trying to spread Japanese hate content on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, during his tenure. He also said that content criticizing Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests was also spread, and content supporting the protests was demoted.
In addition, Yuintao said the company could steal content from competitors, such as Instagram and Snapchat. ByteDance has developed software that scrapes user content from competitors’ websites, which allows it to repost third-party content on its own websites, such as TikTok. Yu Yintao also revealed that the company created “fake users” and manipulated the number of “likes” and “followers” of the accounts.
ByteDance is said to have not responded to a request from the Associated Press.
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