A former US-based executive of ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has sued it for wrongful dismissal, saying he was fired for sounding the alarm over what he called its “culture of lawlessness.”
The suit, filed by Yu Yin-tao (余英濤) in San Francisco, California, comes as political pressure has been growing in the US to ban TikTok.
Critics said the popular platform allows Beijing to covertly collect users’ data and influence their opinions — something the company denies.
Photo: Reuters
In his suit, Yu said that he discovered shortly after being hired in 2017 that ByteDance “was stealing” videos published on rival sites such as 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.
Yu on Friday last week 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.”
He said he had seen ByteDance give prominence to content expressing “hatred for Japan,” while playing down posts supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
Yu said that Chinese government officials had a unit in the US office that “maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States.”
“My client is the most senior executive at ByteDance to come forward publicly,” Yu’s lawyer Charles Jung said on Saturday.
“My client is concerned about protecting American user data, about the ethical operations of the app and the wellbeing of ByteDance’s employees,” he said.
The issue of access to personal data on US users has aroused growing concern among US authorities. The company said it stores that data only on US-based servers.
The White House recently threatened to ban TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sold it to a US company.
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