According to a report released today, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance created a fake account with content taken from Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. He published these reports on his video editing app Flipagram in 2017.
The report shows that the company has received photos, videos, usernames and more from many social media platforms. At the same time, the report says that they did this without any knowledge of the users.
The company sees the stealing as a ‘growth hack’
Four former ByteDance employees spoke to BuzzFeed, who said the stealing began shortly after ByteDance bought Flipagram in January 2017. The resulting documents show that the stealing is seen as a ‘growth hack’ for the company. The employee also said the company aims to scrape more than 10,000 videos per day.
Two of the employees also stated that the company uses it to inform the ‘For you’ algorithm currently used by TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin. Also, employees say ByteDance wants to train the algorithm on US-based content as well. In addition, according to the report, the company skimmed and uploaded content from Musical.ly. It was later claimed that it would evolve into TikTok after ByteDance bought the company in 2017.
Possible copying of content for popularity
The scraped data and internal documents include why the company did this. An employee explained that the stolen content could be used to test the best performing video genre on the platform. He also said that existing users are likely to copy content to gain popularity. Former employees, on the other hand, stated that some people reached out to the company after noticing that their content was published on Flipagram.
The app allegedly used as a growth hack was not unusual for the services available at the time. However, this raises the question of whether TikTok uses video content from competing apps.
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