attention factory the story of tiktok and china's bytedance

attention factory the story of tiktok and china

“We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” the spokesperson said. More from NextShark: Pair wanted for 2 sexual assaults in 2 days at University of Oklahoma In response, ByteDance slammed Yu’s allegations as “baseless claims.”Ī spokesperson told The Hill that Yu had worked for the company for less than a year, during which he worked on a now-discontinued app called Flipagram. Additionally, the company was said to have demoted content that expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong while boosting those that criticized them. Yu in his suit also accused ByteDance of promoting anti-Japanese content on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, according to AP News. More from NextShark: Man sought for destroying and robbing Minneapolis mosque One director reportedly cited a Beijing engineer called “Master Admin” as having “access to everything.” TikTok users’ data had been repeatedly accessed from China.

In June 2022, a BuzzFeed investigation of leaked audio recordings found that U.S. user data, but the Committee continued to have access,” Yu’s suit stated. “After receiving criticism about access from abroad, individual engineers in China were restricted from accessing U.S.

He pointed to a special CCP unit called the “Committee” as providing guidance on advancing “core communist values” and possessing a “death switch” that could turn off the Chinese version of the company’s apps, according to The New York Times. More from NextShark: Los Angeles County passes new gun control measures after Monterey Park mass shooting national security concerns on TikTok, Yu also alleged that the Chinese government monitored all of ByteDance’s data, including those in America. However, Zhu allegedly dismissed them.Īmid U.S. Yu says he raised his concerns multiple times to Zhu Wenjia, who joined ByteDance in 2015 and was chosen to head TikTok’s global research and development in 2021, as per Reuters. The company then reposted those videos to its platforms to boost engagement, which at some point was also allegedly helped by fake users, according to Yu. More from NextShark: Chinese man cooks and eats his pet arowana after it dies, says it's 'most expensive fish' he's ever eaten ByteDance allegedly developed a software that scraped videos from those competitors without permission.

Attention factory the story of tiktok and china's bytedance