TikTok's parent company will 'energetically' fight charges against ex-executive in the US

Yintao Yu filed a lawsuit against ByteDance in a San Francisco courtroom, at a time of increasing political pressure to ban TikTok in the United States.

Critics say the popular platform allows Beijing to collect user data and influence their opinions, which the company denies.

“We plan to vigorously combat what we consider to be unsubstantiated claims and allegations in this lawsuit,” a ByteDance spokesperson said in an email to AFP.

In the lawsuit, filed on May 1, Yu says he discovered shortly after being hired in California in 2017 that the company was “stealing” videos posted on competing networks, such as Instagram and Snapchat, to post them on its own platform. .

Yu, who was head of engineering at ByteDance in the US at the time, says he alerted his superiors, to no avail, “and the theft of intellectual property continued unimpeded.” He was fired in 2018.

According to the company, Yu was an employee of ByteDance Inc. for less than a year and during that period “he worked on an app called Filipagram, which was discontinued for commercial reasons”.

“ByteDance is withprometreated with respect for the intellectual property of other companies, and we acquire data in accordance with industry practices and our global policy,” he added.

On Friday, Yu added to his original lawsuit the accusation that ByteDance serves “as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”

The issue of access to personal data of American users has caused growing concern among the country's authorities. In response, the company states that it only stores this data on servers in the US.

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