Yu, former chief of engineers, is suing the colossus in the US that fired him
A former executive of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, accused the tech giant of “culture of lawlessness,” including stealing content from rival platforms Snapchat and Instagram in its early years, and called the company a “useful propaganda tool for the Communist Party of China.”
The claims are part of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed Friday by Yintao Yu, who served as engineering manager for ByteDance’s US operations from August 2017 to November 2018. The complaint, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, said Mr. Yu was fired because he raised concerns about a “worldwide scheme” to steal and profit from other companies’ intellectual property.
Among the more egregious allegations in Mr. Yu’s lawsuit is that a special unit of Communist Party of China members, sometimes referred to as the Committee, was in the ByteDance Beijing offices, monitoring the company’s apps. , “led how the company advanced core communist values” and possessed a “death switch” that could shut down Chinese apps completely.
“The Committee maintained supreme access to all company data, even data stored in the United States,” the complaint reads. Mr. Yu’s claims, which describe how ByteDance operated five years ago, have emerged as TikTok faces intense national scrutiny over its relationship with the parent company and China’s potential influence on the platform. The video application, used by over 150 million Americans, has become very popular for memes and entertainment. But US lawmakers and officials fear the app will pass sensitive information about Americans to Beijing.
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