A former director of the TikTok parent company accuses the company of illegal practices

According to the lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court on May 1, Yintao Yu discovered shortly after being hired in California in 2017 that ByteDance “stealed” videos posted on competing networks, Instagram and Snapchat, to upload to his own platform.

Yu, then ByteDance’s head of engineering in the US, said he alerted his hierarchy, to no avail, “and the theft of intellectual property continued unimpeded.” He was fired in 2018.

On Friday, the plaintiff filed a lawsuit accusing ByteDance of “serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP).

Yu says he has seen the company highlight content “expressing hatred for Japan” and relegate content “expressing support for the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.”

According to the former employee, the PCC “permanently had supreme access to all company data, including data stored in the United States.”

“My client is the highest ByteDance executive to have spoken publicly,” Charles Jung, his lawyer, told AFP on Saturday.