A former ByteDance manager in the United States is suing his former employer, TikTok’s parent company, which he accuses of firing him for raising the alarm about the company’s illegal practices. Many American elected officials want to ban TikTok in the United States. They claim that the popular platform allows Beijing to collect user data without their knowledge and influence their opinion, which the app has always denied.
According to the lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court on May 1, Yintao Yu discovered shortly after being hired in California in the summer of 2017 that ByteDance was “stealing” videos posted on competing networks, Instagram and Snapchat, to put on his own services. . Yintao Yu, who was ByteDance’s head of engineering in the United States, then reportedly alerted his superiors, to no avail, “and the theft of intellectual property continued unhindered.” He was fired in November 2018.
On Friday, the plaintiff filed an amended complaint accusing ByteDance of “serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP). Yintao Yu said that he saw ByteDance highlight content “expressing hatred for Japan” and demote content “expressing support for Hong Kong pro-democracy protests.”
“Unsubstantiated claims and accusations”
Above all, according to the former employee, the CCP “had permanent supreme access to all company data, including data stored in the United States.” ByteDance intends to “vigorously fight” against “these unsubstantiated claims and accusations,” a company spokesman told AFP. “Yintao Yu worked for ByteDance for less than a year…he was in charge of an app called Flipagram, which was taken off the market years ago for commercial reasons,” he says, he adds.
The engineer is seeking a court order to compel the company to stop the practices mentioned in the complaint and damages of which he plans to pay a “substantial portion” to Asian American civil rights organizations. “My client is the highest ranking ByteDance official to have spoken in public,” Charles Jung, his lawyer, told AFP on Saturday. “He is concerned about the protection of American user data, the ethical behavior of the app, and the well-being of ByteDance employees.”
The issue of access to the personal information of US users has been a source of growing tension for years between authorities and the company, which has taken various steps to ensure that this data is stored on servers in the United States. In late March, during a congressional hearing, TikTok boss Shou Chew again claimed that Beijing did not have access to it. But several elected officials responded that they did not believe him. The White House recently encouraged TikTok to be acquired by an American company in order to remain in the United States.
Source: BFM TV
