The popular social network TikTok is once again at the center of the hurricane, after the lawsuit for unfair dismissal filed last Friday by Yintao Yu, a former executive of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the platform. The former employee, who was the head of engineering for the company’s US operations from August 2017 to November 2018, said in his complaint that he was fired for revealing “illegal conduct” within the company, and assured that the Party Chinese Communist had an office inside the company with “supreme access” to all information.
According to his testimony, ByteDance had a unit in Beijing made up of members of the government party. They were in charge of supervising the entity’s applications. “They gave guidance on how the company promoted core communist values,” Yu said, and had a “kill switch” that had the ability to shut down Chinese apps, he added.
In the lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, he called the company a “useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.” “The Committee maintained supreme access to all company data, including data stored in the United States,” he noted. In addition, in another part of the lawsuit, Yu pointed out that ByteDance promoted content that showed hate towards Japan on the Douyin application, the Chinese version of TikTok.
In the same complaint, the former employee accused the company’s engineers working on Chinese apps of degrading content that showed support for democracy in Hong Kong. Thus, he stresses that Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, facilitated bribes to Lu Wei, a senior Chinese executive officer in charge of Internet regulation. What’s more, Wei was already accused and sentenced, last 2018, for bribery, although he did not disclose who had bribed him.
Yu noted that the company stole content from platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, direct rivals to TikTok, in its early years. ByteDance had for years engaged in a “worldwide scheme (including in California) to steal and profit from the copyrighted works of others.” The company “systematically created manufactured users,” practically an army of bots to increase the volume of interactions. The same former employee pointed out in the lawsuit that he had raised his concerns with Zhu Wenjia, TikTok’s algorithm manager, but he did not agree. gave importance to the matter.
Despite TikTok’s attempts to convince the Chinese executive he has neither special access to the app nor influence in the company, they have worked on a plan to store American user data on other servers operated by Oracle.
This operation is called the Texas Project. It should be noted that there is concern in the United States about the possible influence of the Chinese government on the application, and several bills have already been introduced in Congress to limit or veto the application in the United States.
In the lawsuit, Yu is seeking lost profits and punitive damages, plus 220,000 ByteDance shares that had not yet vested at the time he was fired. For his part, ByteDance defended itself against the ex-employee’s criticism. Through a statement in which they assured that the company “will vigorously oppose what we believe are unsubstantiated claims and accusations.”
“Mr. Yu worked for ByteDance Inc. for less than a year and his employment ended in July 2018. During his brief time with the company, he worked on an app called Flipagram, which was discontinued years ago for business reasons,” they added.