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The Biden administration has threatened to ban the app if its Chinese owners don’t sell their stakes.
TikTok maintains it never gave US user data to China’s government and wouldn’t do so if it was asked.
In another attention-grabbing part of the lawsuit, Yu alleges he observed ByteDance promoting content that expressed hatred for Japan on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. At another time, he said the company demoted content that showed support for the protests in Hong Kong while promoting content that expressed criticism of the protests.
Yu said ByteDance developed software that would scrape user content from competitors’ websites without permission. He alleges the company would then repost the content on its own websites – including TikTok – to attract more engagement from users.
Yu said a fellow TikTok executive in charge of the video-sharing app’s algorithm waved off his concerns. At some point, Yu said the company modified the program, but continued to scrape data from US users when they were abroad.
The former executive also alleges the company created fake users to boost its engagement metrics, including by programming them to “like” and “follow” real accounts.
Yu is seeking punitive damage, lost earnings and 220,000 ByteDance shares that had not vested by the time he was fired.
AP
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