TikTok owner ByteDance to ‘vigorously’ fight ‘baseless’ allegations from former US exec who alleges content theft

ByteDance’s former US head of engineering is suing the company for wrongful termination after raising the alarm over a ‘culture of lawlessness’
‘We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,’ ByteDance said in response

ByteDance

Agence France-Presse

Published: 10:40am, 16 May 2023

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ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, on Monday said it would fight allegations that it fired an executive for sounding the alarm over what he called the company’s “culture of lawlessness”.

Yu Yintao has sued ByteDance in a San Francisco court as political pressure has been growing in the US to ban TikTok. Critics say the popular platform allows Beijing to covertly collect users’ data and influence their opinions – something the company denies.

“We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” a ByteDance representative said in an email to AFP.

In his suit, which was filed this month, Yu said that he discovered shortly after being hired in 2017 that ByteDance “was stealing” videos published on rival sites like Instagram and Snapchat and presenting them as its own.

Yu, who was ByteDance’s US head of engineering, said he notified company leaders about the problem, but the “intellectual property infringement continued unabated”.

He was fired in November 2018.

ByteDance said Yu worked for the company for less than a year and that during his time at there he “worked on an app called Flipagram, which was discontinued years ago for business reasons”.

“ByteDance is committed to respecting the intellectual property of other companies, and we acquire data in accordance with industry practices and our global policy,” the company added.

On Friday, Yu submitted an amendment to his original complaint – which was filed on May 1 – accusing ByteDance of serving “as a useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party”.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies in Washington during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the platform’s consumer privacy and data security practices and impact on children on March 23, 2023. Photo: AP

The issue of access to personal data on American users has aroused growing concern among US authorities. In response, the company says it stores that data only on US-based servers.

At a congressional hearing in Washington in late March, TikTok chief executive Chew Shou Zi assured largely hostile US legislators that Beijing had no access to the data.