A former TikTok executive has admitted that the Chinese government controls the social network at will

A former executive of bytedance sued the company in the United States, the parent company of tick tockwhich he accuses of having fired him because warned of alleged illegal practiceshow to steal videos posted on Instagram and Snapchat, to upload them to your own platform.

The head of engineering for the company’s US operations, Yintao Yuwho served from August 2017 to November 2018, said in his complaint that He was fired for revealing “illegal conduct” within the company and claimed that the Communist Party of China had an office within the company with “supreme access” to all information.

According to his testimony, ByteDance had a unit in Beijing made up of members of the ruling party. They were in charge of overseeing the entity’s applications. “They were driving how the company promoted the core values ​​of communism,” said Yu, e had an “emergency switch” which had the ability to close 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 retained supreme access to all corporate data, including data stored in the United States,” he noted. Also, elsewhere in the lawsuit, Yu noted that ByteDance promoted content that showed hatred towards Japan on the Douyin app, the Chinese version of TikTok.

In the same complaint, the former worker accused the company’s engineers working on Chinese applications of downgrade content showing support for democracy in Hong Kong.

Therefore, he points out that Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, facilitated bribes to Lu Wei, a senior Chinese executive official who deals with Internet regulation. Furthermore, Wei had already been accused and convicted last 2018 of corruption, although he did not reveal who had bribed him.

The allegations against TikTok

On the other hand, Yu stressed that the company stole content from platforms like Snapchat and Instagramdirect rivals of TikTok, in its early years.

ByteDance had been engaged for years in a “worldwide plan (including in California) to steal and profit from the copyrighted works of others”.

The company “systematically created manufactured users” – basically an army of bots – to increase the volume of interactions. The former employee himself stressed in the lawsuit that he had raised his concerns with Zhu Wenjia, head of TikTok’s algorithm, but he did not agree. He gave importance to the matter.

Despite TikTok’s attempts to convince the Chinese executive that they have neither special access to the app nor influence in the company, they have been working on a plan to archive US user data on other servers managed by Oracle.

This operation is called Project Texas. It should be noted that there is concern in the United States about the Chinese government’s possible influence on the demand, and several bills have already been introduced in Congress to restrict or veto the demand in the United States.

In the lawsuit, Yu seeks lost profits and punitive damages, plus 220,000 ByteDance shares which had not yet been awarded at the time of the firing.

For its part, ByteDance has defended itself against criticism from the former employee. Through a statement in which they assured that the company “will strongly oppose what we believe to be unfounded claims and accusations”.

“Mr. Yu worked for ByteDance Inc. for less than a year and his employment ended in July 2018. During his short time at the company, he worked on an app called Flipagram, which was discontinued years ago due to of work,” they added. .