An ex-executive from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance who was fired made a number of allegations against the tech giant on Friday, including that it stole content from rivals like Instagram and Snapchat and acted as a “propaganda tool” for the Chinese government by stifling or promoting content that suited the government’s objectives.
Yintao Yu, who served as the engineering director for ByteDance’s American operations from August 2017 to November 2018, made the claims in a complaint on Friday as part of a wrongful termination action that was filed earlier this month in San Francisco Superior Court. Yu asserts that he was let go for reporting “wrongful conduct” he observed at the business.
Yu claims in the lawsuit that the Chinese government kept an eye on ByteDance’s operations from within its Beijing headquarters and gave recommendations on advancing “core communist values.”
Yu claimed that government officials could disable ByteDance’s Chinese-language apps and kept access to all of the company’s data, including that in the US.
A request for comment from ByteDance did not receive a prompt response.
The charges come at a time when TikTok, one of the most popular social media applications in the United States, is being closely examined in Washington and certain states over its ability to protect American data from the Chinese government. If the Chinese owners of the app don’t sell their stakes, the Biden administration has threatened to prohibit the service.
TikTok insists that it has never provided the Chinese government with user data from Americans and that it would not do so if requested. It also intends to keep U.S. customer data on servers run by the software behemoth Oracle in an effort to evade a ban.
Another eye-catching claim made by Yu in the lawsuit is that he saw ByteDance pushing material on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, that showed hatred towards Japan. Another time, he claimed that the business promoted content that expressed disapproval of the protesters in Hong Kong while demoting information that expressed support for them.
Yu said that ByteDance created software that would illegally harvest user content from rival companies’ websites. He claims that the business would later repost the content on its own websites, including TikTok, to increase user engagement.
Yu claimed that a fellow TikTok executive in charge of the algorithm for the video-sharing app dismissed his worries. Yu claimed that although the corporation eventually changed the program, it still scraped data from American consumers when they were away.
Additionally, according to the former executive, the corporation programmed bogus users to “like” and “follow” actual profiles in order to increase engagement numbers.
Yu is requesting 220,000 ByteDance shares that had not vested by the time of his termination, punitive damages, lost wages, and other compensation.
