(San Francisco) A former manager of ByteDance in the United States is suing his former employer, the parent company of TikTok, which he accuses of having dismissed him because he had raised the alert on illegal practices of the company. ‘business.
Many American elected officials want to ban TikTok in the United States. They assure that the popular platform allows Beijing to collect user data without their knowledge and influence their opinion, which the application has always denied.
According to the lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court on 1er May, Yintao Yu discovered shortly after being hired in California in the summer of 2017 that ByteDance was “stealing” videos posted on competing networks, Instagram and Snapchat, to put them on its own services.
Mr. Yu, who was chief of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, would then have alerted his superiors, in vain, “and the theft of intellectual property continued unhindered”. He was fired in November 2018.
On Friday, the plaintiff filed an amended lawsuit that accuses ByteDance of “serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP).
Mr. Yu says he saw ByteDance highlight content “that expressed hatred for Japan” and relegate content “that expressed support for the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong”.
Above all, according to the ex-employee, the CCP “had permanent supreme access to all company data, including data stored in the United States”.
“My client is the most senior ByteDance official to speak publicly,” Charles Jung, his attorney, said Saturday.
“My client is concerned about the protection of US user data, the ethical behavior of the app, and the well-being of ByteDance employees.”
The subject of access to the personal information of American users has been a source of growing tension for years between the authorities and the company, which has taken several measures to ensure that this data is stored on servers in the United States.
At the end of March, during a hearing in Congress, the boss of TikTok, Shou Chew, again claimed that Beijing did not have access to it. But several elected officials replied that they did not believe him.
The White House recently pushed TikTok to get bought out by an American company so it could stay in the United States.
ByteDance and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request from AFP.
Mr. Yu is seeking a court injunction to force the company to stop the practices cited in the complaint and damages, of which he plans to pay a “substantial part” to civil rights organizations for Asian Americans .