A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has accused the tech giant of a “lawless culture”, including stealing content from rival platforms Snapchat and Instagram in its early days, calling the company a “useful propaganda tool for the United States.” called. It’s the Chinese Communist Party. ”
The allegations were part of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed on Friday by Intao Yu, who was the head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations from August 2017 to November 2018. The complaint, filed in the San Francisco Superior Court, alleges that Yu was dismissed for the following reasons: He expressed concern about a “global plan” to steal other companies’ intellectual property for profit.
One of the most striking allegations in Yu’s lawsuit is that ByteDance’s offices in Beijing have a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members, also known as a committee, that monitors the company’s app and claims that “the company is a communist.” It’s a “death switch” that turns off Chinese apps entirely.
“The Commission maintained the highest degree of access to all corporate data, including data stored in the United States,” the complaint states.
Yu’s claims describing how ByteDance operated five years ago are surfacing as TikTok faces intense domestic scrutiny over its relationship with its parent company and China’s potential influence over the platform. This video his app is used by his over 150 million Americans and is very popular for memes and entertainment. But lawmakers and U.S. officials fear the app is passing sensitive information about Americans to the Chinese government.
In March, a parliamentary committee slammed TikTok CEO Zhou Chu over TikTok’s Chinese ownership. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray recently said that TikTok “cries out national security concerns.” Since November, more than 20 states have banned TikTok from government devices.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yu, 36, said in his complaint that when TikTok was trying to attract users in its early days, ByteDance engineers copied videos and posts from Snapchat and Instagram without permission and posted them on the app. He also said that ByteDance was creating “systematically faked users” (essentially an army of bots) to boost engagement numbers, and that Yu reported this practice to his boss. Stated.
Yu said he raised these concerns to Zhu Wenjia, head of the TikTok algorithm, but Zhu was “negative” and said it was “not a big deal.”
Yu, who spent part of his tenure at ByteDance working in the company’s China office, said he saw engineers at Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, tweaking algorithms to boost content that expressed hatred of Japan. He also said he saw it. In an interview, he said he didn’t hesitate to promote anti-Japanese sentiment that would make it more visible to users.
“There was no discussion,” he said. “They just did it.”
The lawsuit also accused engineers at ByteDance, which develops a Chinese app, for downgrading content that expressed support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement while making more prominent criticism of the protest movement. rice field.
The complaint alleges that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming helped bribe Lu Wei, a senior government official who has been indicted on internet-policing charges, in one instance of alleged “lawlessness” within the company. Chinese media at the time reported on the trial of Lu Wei, who was indicted and subsequently convicted on bribery charges in 2018, without mentioning who paid the bribes.
TikTok, which operates arm in arm with ByteDance, has been trying to convince lawmakers that the Chinese government has no influence or special access to the app. The company is working on a costly plan to store U.S. user data on Oracle-operated servers in the U.S. known as Project Texas.
Yu, who was born and raised in China and now lives in San Francisco, said in an interview that U.S. user data on TikTok was stored in the U.S. during his tenure. But Chinese engineers had access to it, he said.
The geographic location of the servers is “irrelevant,” he said, as engineers can access them from across continents. He said some engineers had “backdoor” access to user data during his tenure.
His lawsuit seeks lost profits, punitive damages and 220,000 shares of ByteDance stock that were not vested at the time of his termination. The complaint doesn’t mention specific damages, but the stock alone could be worth tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit comes after years of unsuccessful arbitration with the company.
