Former TikTok employees are claiming that at least five senior leaders at the social media firm have left in the last two years because they discovered they were unable to significantly influence decision-making as the company is still largely directed by its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
Speaking at the Code Conference in Los Angeles, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel gave his thoughts on how China-owned TikTok has dominated the online video market in such a short space of time. Spiegel explained how Communist China has overpowered social media through seemingly unlimited spending, saying: “What nobody had anticipated in the United States was the level of investment that ByteDance made into the U.S. market, and of course in Europe, because it was just something that was unimaginable — no startup could afford to invest billions and billions and billions of dollars in user acquisition like that around the world.”
Emily Jashinsky, culture editor at The Federalist, explained on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow how TikTok may provide the Chinese Communist Party with the ability to manipulate American voters’ political perceptions.
A software researcher recently claimed that China-owned TikTok’s in-app browser is capable of monitoring and recording user keystrokes, which the company has since confirmed. Of course, the Chinese company is quick to state that the code in its app is only used for “debugging,” but this may be another lie from the company known for its mistruths.
The LinkedIn profiles for hundreds of China-owned Tiktok and ByteDance employees reveal that many used to work for Chinese state media, and in some cases still maintain their employment with Chinese government mouthpieces.
ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the controversial video blogging platform TikTok, quietly took control of China’s largest chain of private obstetrics and gynecology hospitals in June.
Bloomberg News reported on Friday that internal messages from executives at TikTok, the Chinese-owned video blogging platform, revealed demands from the Chinese government to establish a stealth account to push Chinese Communist Party propaganda to American and European audiences.
Joe Rogan pointed out during a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience that the popular social media platform TikTok is sharing user information with China, warning Americans to think twice about using the app.
Former employees of ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, claim that the company placed pro-China propaganda in its now-defunct U.S. news app, TopBuzz.
According to recently leaked internal TikTok documents, the company has been developing PR strategies to respond to criticisms of its links to China, including the fact that it is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
ByteDance, the Chinese corporation that owns the video microblogging platform TikTok, announced this week that it will begin designing and producing its own computer chips with an eye toward chipsets that will maximize the performance of the company’s video software.
The controversial Chinese app TikTok has shot up the list of news sources for British teenagers, alongside Instagram and Youtube.
China-owned TikTok is facing claims that its algorithm steers violent videos towards black users rather than white users in a lawsuit blaming the platform for the death of a 14-year-old girl named Englyn Roberts.
Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok has reportedly begun laying off its American, UK, and E.U. employees as part of a global restructuring of the business.
China’s TikTok has reportedly abandoned plans to launch a shopping feature in the U.S. following a disastrous test of the same feature in the UK. Many members of the UK team abandoned the company due to oppressive management practices. One former team leader said, “The culture is really toxic. Relationships there are built on fear, not cooperation.”
The Chinese-owned video app TikTok has confirmed that employees within the communist dictatorship can access the personal data of U.S. users.
Recently leaked audio from over 80 internal meetings reveals that China-based employees of the massively popular app TikTok repeatedly accessedU.S. user data, despite the company’s claims to the contrary.
Videos posted on the Chinese-owned TikTok social media platform in Kenya in recent weeks have allegedly featured “hate, incitement and other political disinformation” that may provoke ethnic violence in the run-up to Kenya’s 2022 presidential election in August, Al Jazeera reported on Friday.
Former TikTok employees are criticizing the Chinese-owned company stating that they experienced an intense culture of overwork, unrealistic productivity expectations, and secrecy surrounding salaries. Among the former workers’ complaints is the company’s enforcement of “996 culture,” a management style common in China in which employees are expected to work from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. six days a week.
A mother of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl is suing China’s TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, alleging that her daughter died participating in the “Blackout Challenge” trend popular on the platform.
Chinese-owned social media app TikTok is set to triple its ad revenue in 2022 to more than $11 billion, totaling more ad sales than Twitter and Snapchat combined.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance made fake accounts using content it scraped from Instagram and Snapchat, according to former employees, who described the project as one of several “growth hacks” implemented by the company.
Users reportedly spent around $2.3 billion on the popular Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok last year, according to a recent report. This represents an astounding 77 percent increase from the previous year. TikTok also surpassed 3 billion global installations, the first app to do so since Facebook.
Alex Marlow and Frances Martel both described TikTok as a “foreign weapon” targeting American children and youth.
Amazon Alexa’s deadly recommendation that a 10-year-old girl touch a penny to the exposed prongs of an electrified power plug reportedly had its origins in a TikTok trend known as the “penny challenge” that encouraged young people to do the same thing.
Candie Frazier, a content moderator for Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok, which recently surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the world, is suing the company, alleging that it did not provide a safe workplace environment and gave her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Hollywood star Rosanna Arquette has slammed the Chinese owner of TikTok for allegedly allowing threats of potential gun violence in schools to spread on the platform, saying TikTok should be shut down until those threats are removed.
A recent report states that despite supposed efforts to distance itself from its communist China, TikTok insiders claim that the final say for the platform often comes from parent company ByteDance in Beijing. One former staffer reportedly told Business Insider that: “It’s that feeling a little bit in the US where you’re sort of helpless to a lot of the decisions that are made out of China.”
TikTok executive Michael Beckerman insisted that the Chinese-owned social media platform does not share user data with the Chinese government during a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
The Chinese version of TikTok, an app called Douyin, is reportedly introducing a “teenage mode” that will limit the amount of time children below the age of 14 are allowed to spend on the video app to 40 minutes a day.
According to recent reports, the Chinese communist government has gained a board seat in a key entity of TikTok parent company Bytedance which has raised doubts around the independence of the company and the influence wielded over it by Beijing.
In a rare move for a Hollywood star, Ashton Kutcher has issued a warning about China, saying Beijing could use TikTok to influence the minds of Americans when it comes to issues like Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Former TikTok employees have recently claimed that there is cause for concern about the megapopular app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance and the tight control it holds over the social media platform.
President Joe Biden has signed an executive order revoking former President Trump’s ban on Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat.
The Chinese-owned social media app TikTok has reportedly agreed to pay $92 million to settle dozens of lawsuits alleging that the app harvested personal data from users without consent and shared the data with third-parties, including some in China. Experts are calling it one of the largest privacy-related payouts in history.
The deal for TikTok’s American operations with Oracle and Walmart has been put on hold indefinitely by the Biden White House, according to the New York Times.
In a formal government notice issued this week, the Commerce Department stated that the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok won’t be shut down just yet.
The Chinese-owned social media firm TikTok has asked a federal appeals court to void the Trump administration’s order demanding that the company divest its operations in the U.S. TikTok’s Chinese parent company claims the order violates its Constitutional rights.
The federal government appealed a judge’s ruling on Thursday that prevented the Trump administration from imposing a ban on the Chinese-owned app TikTok over national security concerns.
A judge has temporarily blocked the U.S. government from banning the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok from being downloaded from Apple and Google’s app stores.