TikTok owner ByteDance ‘scraped’ content from Instagram, Snapchat

San Francisco: Chinese language short-video-making app TikTok‘s father or mother firm ByteDance allegedly made pretend accounts with content material taken from Instagram, Snapchat and different social media platforms, a brand new report has claimed.

In response to BuzzFeed News, the corporate then posted these pretend accounts on well-liked cellular app Flipagram to develop additional.

“The China-based firm scraped public accounts after which duplicated them on Flipagram, a predecessor to TikTok, in line with 4 former workers and paperwork seen by BuzzFeed News,” the report stated late on Monday.

Based in 2013, Flipagram allowed customers to create and share brief movies as one thing of a TikTok precursor.

ByteDance allegedly took movies, usernames, photos and extra from the social media platforms and uploaded them to the app with out customers’ consent or information.

Inner paperwork reviewed by BuzzFeed News point out that the scraping was seen as a “development hack” for the corporate.

In response to the previous worker, the crew’s objective was to “scrape greater than 10,000 movies a day within the highest precedence nations”.

The scraped content material was used to coach ByteDance’s highly effective “For You” personalisation algorithm on the US-based content material.

“Immediately, the ‘For You’ algorithm powers each TikTok and its Chinese language equal, Douyin,” the report famous.

The report additionally stated that ByteDance was scraping and importing content material from Musical.ly, which might later turn into TikTok as ByteDance acquired the corporate in 2017.

In an announcement, a ByteDance spokesperson stated: “ByteDance acquired Flipagram in 2017 and operated it, and subsequently Vigo, for a short while. Flipagram and Vigo ceased operations years in the past and are not linked to any present ByteDance merchandise.”

Brief video-making platform TikTok has crossed one billion month-to-month energetic customers world wide.

It has overtaken Fb as essentially the most downloaded social media app on this planet.

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