ByteDance

An internal ByteDance investigation found that employees on a team monitoring staff conduct had accessed the IP addresses and other TikTok data of two journalists, Emily Baker-White (then BuzzFeed, later Forbes) and Cristina Criddle (Financial Times), and of people connected to them, in summer 2022 to try to identify sources of leaks.

Response: ByteDance said all four employees involved were fired, that it had restructured its internal audit and risk team and removed that department's access to US data.

• The New York Times ↗

ByteDance's main Chinese subsidiary, Beijing ByteDance Technology, which runs Douyin and Toutiao, sold a 1% stake to a unit of the state-backed China Internet Investment Fund and gave the government investor a board seat, a transaction reported in August 2021.

• South China Morning Post ↗

A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that TikTok restricted ("shadow-banned") LGBTQ-related hashtags in several languages, including "gay" in Arabic, Russian, Estonian and Bosnian, "I am gay" and "I am lesbian" in Russian, and "transgender" in Arabic. TikTok acknowledged restricting some LGBT hashtags in some countries as part of its "localised" moderation.

Response: TikTok said some terms were partially restricted due to local laws, others because they were mainly used to search for pornographic content, and that some English phrases and some compound phrases in Arabic had been moderated by mistake; it denied practising censorship.

• BBC News ↗
• The Advocate ↗

Leaked TikTok moderation guidelines revealed by the Guardian instructed moderators to censor videos mentioning Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or the banned religious group Falun Gong, which the Guardian described as ByteDance advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.

Response: ByteDance said the version of the guidelines seen by the Guardian was retired in May 2019, that the old guidelines took "a blunt approach" and were outdated, and that current guidelines do not reference specific countries or issues.

• The Guardian ↗