Former ByteDance Exec Claims TikTok Stole Content From Competitors
A former employee of TikTok owner ByteDance who is taking the company to court over wrongful termination has alleged it stole content from Snapchat and Instagram in order to boost TikTok engagement.
The claims, reported(Opens in a new window) by The New York Times, were filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Friday by Yintao Yu, former head of engineering for ByteDance’s US operations between August 2017 and November 2018.
Mr Yu claims he was fired from his position because he had raised concerns about ByteDance stealing and profiting from other companies’ intellectual property to increase TikTok engagement and user numbers.
In news that will likely further trouble US lawmakers who have been moving to ban TikTok in the US due to concerns about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in its parent company, Yu also alleged that at the time of his employment, ByteDance’s Beijing offices had a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members nicknamed the Committee, which tracked ByteDance apps including TikTok. The so-called Committee are also alleged to have “guided how the company advanced core Communist values”, the Times notes, and had access to all company data including US stored data.
Yu further alleged that ByteDance used bots to inflate TikTok’s app engagement metrics when it was launched as Musical.ly. According to the Times, Yu says he raised concerns with a senior staffer in charge of the TikTok algorithm but was rebuffed and told that his worries were “not a big deal.”
In an emailed statement reported by the Times, ByteDance called the allegations made by Yu “baseless.” The statement continued: “Mr Yu worked for ByteDance Inc. for less than a year and his employment ended in July 2018. During his brief
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