TikTok's Parent, ByteDance, Made Fake Accounts With Content Scraped From Instagram And Snapchat, Former Employees Say
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2017, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, scraped short-form videos, usernames, profile pictures, and profile descriptions from Instagram, Snapchat, and other sources and then uploaded them -- without users' knowledge or consent -- to Flipagram, a TikTok predecessor, according to four former employees of the company. BuzzFeed News spoke with the four former ByteDance employees, all of whom worked on Flipagram (later renamed Vigo Video), and viewed internal documents that indicate the scraping was run by an engineering team in China and began soon after ByteDance acquired Flipagram in January 2017. The former employees described the project as one of several "growth hacks" -- including the manipulation of like and video view statistics â" employed by the company. One of the former employees said the scraping affected hundreds of thousands of accounts, and a document viewed by BuzzFeed News detailed plans to "crawl video > 10k/day in P0 countries" -- according to the former employee, this meant the team's goal was to scrape more than 10,000 videos a day in the highest priority countries. The former employees spoke to BuzzFeed News under the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from ByteDance. The former employees do not know when the scraping they say they were aware of stopped. Two of them say that the scraped content was used to train ByteDance's powerful "For You" personalization algorithm on US-based content so that it would better reflect the preferences of US users. Today, the "For You" algorithm powers both TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin.
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