Ex-ByteDance executive claims reporting illegal conduct got him fired

 (May 13): ByteDance Inc’s former head of engineering in the US said in a lawsuit he was fired for voicing concerns to the management that the TikTok owner was stealing copyrighted content from other platforms, including Instagram and Snapchat. He also alleged that the company fabricated users to exaggerate its metrics, and help the China’s Communist Party spread propaganda to a larger audience.

 Joel Rosenblatt / Bloomberg

13 May 2023, 10:40 am

Yintao “Roger” Yu said he learned soon after he joined the company in 2017 that ByteDance had for years undertaken a “worldwide scheme (including in California) to steal and profit from the copyrighted works of others”, according to his complaint filed on Friday (May 12) in the San Francisco state court. 

He also discovered that the company was programming fabricated users to “like” and “follow” real user accounts to boost the engagement metrics relied on by potential investors, according to the complaint. 

Yu alleged that the company was driven by a “culture of lawlessness” that focused on growth at all costs.

“He was surprised by the brazenly unlawful conduct within the company, which was euphemistically excused as ‘entrepreneurship’,” according to the complaint.

When Yu reported his concerns to higher-ups, they were dismissive or asked him to hide the illegal activity, and he was eventually terminated in late 2018 after a medical leave, according to the suit, which identifies one supervisor who was in “a position to retaliate” against him as Kelly Zhang, who is now ByteDance China’s chief executive officer.

TikTok has been under intense scrutiny from Congress and a federal national security review over concerns about potential influence from the Chinese government, because ByteDance is based in China. Multiple bills have been introduced that would limit or ban the app in the US.

As recently as this month in a letter to Congress, the company said it “had never shared” any US user data with the Chinese government, and wouldn’t if requested to do so. TikTok says it is in the process of walling off its sensitive US operations into a separate entity with relevant data kept on Oracle Corp’s domestic servers.

ByteDance representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. 

ByteDance relied on software to strip video from competitors’ websites to make its service appear more popular with users, according to the complaint. “These actions were taken without the permission of the content creators, and represented an unlawful effort to gain an edge against entrenched online video hosting websites,” according to the complaint.

Concerned about ByteDance’s skirting of “legal and ethical lines”, and the potential liability for the theft, Yu said he had repeatedly raised objections, including to a senior vice-president of engineering who reported directly to ByteDance CEO Yiming Zhang. But the senior vice-president dismissed his concerns and the infringement continued, according to the complaint.

Yu is seeking a court order directing ByteDance to stop scraping social media content that belongs to others.

The lawsuit also details Yu’s objection to the company’s treatment of an unidentified employee suffering from depression. He said he had lodged a complaint with ByteDance’s head of human resources about an illegal plan to fire the employee.

Yu, a resident of California, was hired with stock options and a guaranteed payment of US$600,000 (RM2.68 million) for the intellectual property of his own company, Tank Exchange, with the condition that he stayed with ByteDance for two years, according to the complaint.

ByteDance claims it notified Yu that his termination was due a reduction in headcount, but he argued he never received any notices, according to the suit. In November 2018, he was terminated without the stock option award which he said had vested. In 2019, he filed a discrimination complaint with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, according to the suit.

The case is Yu v. ByteDance Inc, CGC-23-606246, California Superior Court, San Francisco County.

https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/666854

TikTok: Why do countries think Chinese tech firms are a security risk?

 US Congress members have grilled TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew over the the safety of the social media app.

The US has threatened to ban it completely if the company remains under Chinese ownership.

Many Western countries are also taking measures against other Chinese tech firms over security fears.

24 March 2023

What restrictions have been introduced against TikTok?

TikTok is a platform for creating and sharing short videos and is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

It was started in 2016, and has become the third most popular internet service in the world, with more than a billion active monthly users.

The app has been banned on government devices in Canada, Belgium, Denmark, New Zealand, Taiwan, the UK and the US.

The UK government has banned TikTok on the phones it gives its staff

The EU told its staff to remove the app from phones it has issued, and also recommended they remove it from private devices on which official apps are installed.

India has banned TikTok outright because of security concerns.

Afghanistan has also banned it to prevent young people from "being misled".

• TikTok's US future at stake in showdown at Congress
• Who is TikTok chief Shou Zi Chew?
• How a TikTok ban would - or wouldn't - work in practice

Why do countries think TikTok poses a security risk?

TikTok gathers the same type of user data as many other social media firms such as Facebook and Instagram.

This includes names, ages, phone numbers, email addresses and photos.

FBI director Chris Wray has pointed to China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, saying it requires companies "to do whatever the government wants them to do in terms of showing them information or serving as a tool for the Chinese government."

TikTok also has a tool which recommends video clips for users to watch, called the "For You" feed, which experts say is better designed than those used by Facebook or Youtube.

"TikTok has a more complex model in terms of showing content to its users," says Dr Maryam Mehrnezhad from the Department of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. "This makes the spread of misinformation easier and its identification and detection more difficult."

• TikTok users shrug at China fears: 'It's hard to care'

Which other Chinese tech has been targeted?

Chinese companies specialising in 5G technology such as Huawei, ZTE and Hytera have been banned from installing equipment on networks in Australia, the US, Japan, India, and Canada.

The UK government has ordered equipment installed by Huawei to be removed from 5G networks by 2027.

Huawei has been blocked from installing equipment in many countries' 5G networks

The US and Dutch governments are restricting the export of semiconductors to China because of security fears over the country's development of supercomputing and AI technology.

The UK and Australian government have ordered Chinese-made security cameras to be removed from sensitive sites.

• Police use of Chinese cameras criticised

What is behind these bans?

Governments fear that 5G equipment installed by Chinese firms in foreign countries' networks contains "backdoors" through which data can be passed back to Beijing.

Through companies such as Hikvision, China is the world's largest producer of security cameras. It is thought that that these could also be secretly feeding intelligence to China.

"Why wouldn't they have put in backdoor access?" asks Prof Anderson. "Western countries have done that for years when they've built telephone networks around the world."

Countries like Australia and the UK are removing Chinese-made cameras from sensitive sites

There's no hard evidence that China is using its tech firms for espionage, says Jake Moore, global security advisor to ESET, an internet security firm.

However, he says: "There's a fear that firms like Huawei and TikTok have become so big that they could be hacking huge amounts of data and damaging national security.

"Governments are right to take precautions against it now rather than later."

• What is Huawei and why is it being banned?
• US ramps up curbs on chip sales to China

What does China say about curbs on its tech firms?

China's foreign ministry has called the bans on TikTok and other tech firms "political theatre", saying the "US is overstretching national security concerns to suppress other countries' companies."

TikTok insists it gathers no more data than other social media apps, and is independent of the government.

In 2022, it admitted that some of its staff in China could access user data gathered in Europe, but it says that it is working on ways of keeping such information within Europe.

It also says that American users' data is nowadays processed through US servers, and does not go to China.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65019279

Chinese government asked TikTok for stealth propaganda account

 (July 29): A Chinese government entity responsible for public relations attempted to open a stealth account on TikTok targeting Western audiences with propaganda, according to internal messages seen by Bloomberg.

Olivia Solon

/

Bloomberg

July 29, 2022 19:40 pm +08

https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/chinese-government-asked-tiktok-stealth-propaganda-account

A Chinese government entity responsible for public relations attempted to open a stealth account on TikTok targeting Western audiences with propaganda, according to internal messages seen by Bloomberg.

The attempt, which met with push-back from TikTok executives, highlights the internal tensions within the fast-growing social media app, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Inc, which has constantly attempted to distance itself from Chinese state influence.

In an April 2020 message addressed to Elizabeth Kanter, TikTok’s head of government relations for the UK, Ireland, Netherlands and Israel, a colleague flagged a “Chinese government entity that’s interested in joining TikTok but would not want to be openly seen as a government account as the main purpose is for promoting content that showcase the best side of China (some sort of propaganda)”.

The messages indicate that some of ByteDance’s most senior government relations team, including Kanter and US-based Erich Andersen, Global Head of Corporate Affairs and General Counsel, discussed the matter internally but pushed back on the request, which they described as “sensitive”. TikTok used the incident to spark an internal discussion about other sensitive requests, the messages state.

“We declined to offer support for this request, as we believed the creation of such an account would violate our Community Guidelines,” said a TikTok spokeswoman, who downplayed the incident as an informal request from a friend of an employee.

TikTok has rules against “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, where accounts conceal their true identity to exert influence or sway public opinion, and against political advertising, the spokeswoman said.

TikTok does allow some Chinese government entities, including the Chinese embassy in the United States, to have verified accounts. The company is planning to expand its state-controlled media policy, which labels state-run accounts, in the “coming months” to include other government entities, the spokeswoman added.

Kanter and Andersen declined to comment. The Chinese government did not respond to a request for comment.

The messages have emerged in the same week that UK foreign secretary Liz Truss pledged to crack down on Chinese-owned companies including TikTok during a head-to-head debate with Rishi Sunak as part of their campaign to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian criticised the remarks made by Truss on Monday.

“I want to make it clear to certain British politicians that making irresponsible remarks about China, including hyping up the so-called China threat, cannot solve one’s own problems,” Zhao said during a regular news briefing in Beijing on Tuesday.

The extent to which the Chinese government exerts influence over ByteDance has been a source of tension for TikTok as it has expanded internationally. In September 2020, the Trump administration accused TikTok of being “a mouthpiece” for the Communist Party as part of an ultimately push to shut down the app in the US if it wouldn’t sell to an American owner.

The same month, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said in a report that TikTok often buries or hides words reflecting political movements, including criticism of Vladimir Putin, as well as hashtags relating to gender and sexual orientation or religion in most countries where it operates. At the time, TikTok strenuously denied it would cooperate with any demands from China’s regime.

A sea of government apparatus, state-sanctioned influencers and hawkish news outlets use social entertainment platforms like Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, Bilibili Inc and Weibo Corp to push propaganda to China’s young people.

The Youth League, the Communist Party’s branch for younger members, is among Douyin’s top creators, with about eight million followers, double those of Taylor Swift.

Douyin, available in local app stores, is run as a separate entity. Both TikTok and Douyin focus on short-form video making and sharing, but Douyin has content controls to comply with Chinese law.

The Chinese government wanted advice on how to run an account that was engaging for a Western audience and that “they also mentioned payment”, according to the messages seen by Bloomberg.

https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/chinese-government-asked-tiktok-stealth-propaganda-account