China-owned TikTok is facing claims that its algorithm steers violent videos towards black users rather than white users in a lawsuit blaming the platform for the death of a 14-year-old girl named Englyn Roberts.
Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok has reportedly begun laying off its American, UK, and E.U. employees as part of a global restructuring of the business.
China’s TikTok has reportedly abandoned plans to launch a shopping feature in the U.S. following a disastrous test of the same feature in the UK. Many members of the UK team abandoned the company due to oppressive management practices. One former team leader said, “The culture is really toxic. Relationships there are built on fear, not cooperation.”
The Chinese-owned video app TikTok has confirmed that employees within the communist dictatorship can access the personal data of U.S. users.
Recently leaked audio from over 80 internal meetings reveals that China-based employees of the massively popular app TikTok repeatedly accessedU.S. user data, despite the company’s claims to the contrary.
Videos posted on the Chinese-owned TikTok social media platform in Kenya in recent weeks have allegedly featured “hate, incitement and other political disinformation” that may provoke ethnic violence in the run-up to Kenya’s 2022 presidential election in August, Al Jazeera reported on Friday.
Former TikTok employees are criticizing the Chinese-owned company stating that they experienced an intense culture of overwork, unrealistic productivity expectations, and secrecy surrounding salaries. Among the former workers’ complaints is the company’s enforcement of “996 culture,” a management style common in China in which employees are expected to work from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. six days a week.
A mother of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl is suing China’s TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, alleging that her daughter died participating in the “Blackout Challenge” trend popular on the platform.
Chinese-owned social media app TikTok is set to triple its ad revenue in 2022 to more than $11 billion, totaling more ad sales than Twitter and Snapchat combined.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance made fake accounts using content it scraped from Instagram and Snapchat, according to former employees, who described the project as one of several “growth hacks” implemented by the company.
Users reportedly spent around $2.3 billion on the popular Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok last year, according to a recent report. This represents an astounding 77 percent increase from the previous year. TikTok also surpassed 3 billion global installations, the first app to do so since Facebook.
Alex Marlow and Frances Martel both described TikTok as a “foreign weapon” targeting American children and youth.
Amazon Alexa’s deadly recommendation that a 10-year-old girl touch a penny to the exposed prongs of an electrified power plug reportedly had its origins in a TikTok trend known as the “penny challenge” that encouraged young people to do the same thing.
Candie Frazier, a content moderator for Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok, which recently surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the world, is suing the company, alleging that it did not provide a safe workplace environment and gave her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Hollywood star Rosanna Arquette has slammed the Chinese owner of TikTok for allegedly allowing threats of potential gun violence in schools to spread on the platform, saying TikTok should be shut down until those threats are removed.
A recent report states that despite supposed efforts to distance itself from its communist China, TikTok insiders claim that the final say for the platform often comes from parent company ByteDance in Beijing. One former staffer reportedly told Business Insider that: “It’s that feeling a little bit in the US where you’re sort of helpless to a lot of the decisions that are made out of China.”
TikTok executive Michael Beckerman insisted that the Chinese-owned social media platform does not share user data with the Chinese government during a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
The Chinese version of TikTok, an app called Douyin, is reportedly introducing a “teenage mode” that will limit the amount of time children below the age of 14 are allowed to spend on the video app to 40 minutes a day.
According to recent reports, the Chinese communist government has gained a board seat in a key entity of TikTok parent company Bytedance which has raised doubts around the independence of the company and the influence wielded over it by Beijing.
In a rare move for a Hollywood star, Ashton Kutcher has issued a warning about China, saying Beijing could use TikTok to influence the minds of Americans when it comes to issues like Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Former TikTok employees have recently claimed that there is cause for concern about the megapopular app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance and the tight control it holds over the social media platform.
President Joe Biden has signed an executive order revoking former President Trump’s ban on Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat.
The Chinese-owned social media app TikTok has reportedly agreed to pay $92 million to settle dozens of lawsuits alleging that the app harvested personal data from users without consent and shared the data with third-parties, including some in China. Experts are calling it one of the largest privacy-related payouts in history.
The deal for TikTok’s American operations with Oracle and Walmart has been put on hold indefinitely by the Biden White House, according to the New York Times.
In a formal government notice issued this week, the Commerce Department stated that the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok won’t be shut down just yet.
The Chinese-owned social media firm TikTok has asked a federal appeals court to void the Trump administration’s order demanding that the company divest its operations in the U.S. TikTok’s Chinese parent company claims the order violates its Constitutional rights.
The federal government appealed a judge’s ruling on Thursday that prevented the Trump administration from imposing a ban on the Chinese-owned app TikTok over national security concerns.
A judge has temporarily blocked the U.S. government from banning the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok from being downloaded from Apple and Google’s app stores.
Last week, Chinese Communist state media were hailing a prospective deal between Chinese company ByteDance, Oracle, and Walmart for control of the TikTok social media platform as a huge win for ByteDance and China, and a crushing defeat for President Donald Trump — The terms of the deal, however, changed a little over the ensuing week, prompting Chinese media to denounce it as “highway robbery” on Friday.
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of video-sharing app TikTok, has requested a temporary block on a ban of the app by the Trump administration. A U.S. judge has now ordered the federal government to defend the ban on Friday afternoon, or delay the blacklisting scheduled for Sunday.
A recent report shows that tensions between TikTok and its potential U.S. partner, Oracle, have risen as a debate over the ownership structure of the potential U.S.-based corporation continues.
Chinese state media trumpeted this weekend’s tentative deal between China’s ByteDance and U.S. companies Oracle and Walmart for control over the social media platform TikTok as a major victory for the Chinese firm against “U.S. hegemonic suppression.”
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has emphasized that it will remain in control of the TikTok Global business which appears to contradict President Trump’s recent statement that the entity will be direct by Americans and pay a $5 billion fee to the U.S. government.
President Trump has approved a deal that would create a partnership between the Chinese app TikTok and Oracle and Walmart to manage TikTok’s operation in America. TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, will own a majority share of the company and maintain ownership of TikTok’s all-important algorithms.
China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday praised “defiant” ByteDance, parent company of the video microblogging platform TikTok, for refusing to sell full control of the platform to an American company to avoid getting banned by the Trump administration.
A recent report by Reuters claims that the U.S. Commerce Department plans to block downloads of the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat in the United States by Sunday, September 20. This claim, made by three sources, could indicate the Trump White House is not satisfied by the Oracle deal to be a “trusted” partner for TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance.
As Silicon Valley giant Oracle faces backlash over its recent deal with Chinese company ByteDance to enter a partnership with TikTok, the company has promised to review the video-sharing app’s source code and software to ensure that there are no software backdoors that could be accessed by the Chinese government.
Chinese state media praised the proposed deal between TikTok creators ByteDance and Oracle Corporation on Tuesday, with the Communist Party’s Global Times saluting it as recognition for “the hard-won efforts of the Chinese company amid a lack of trust between the world’s two largest economies.”
According to a recent report, Microsoft’s reference to the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok as a “security risk” offended the company’s CEO, Yiming Zhang, resulting in the sale of TikTok to the tech giant falling through.
Oracle has won the bidding to take over the U.S. operations of the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, beating out Microsoft in a deal to allow the platform to continue operating in the United States. According to some sources familiar with the deal, it is closer to a “partnership” than an outright acquisition.