Xi Jinping and logos of Bytedance and Tiktok Photograph:( Agencies )
Forbes investigated LinkedIn profiles and discovered strong links between TikTok’s parent firm, ByteDance, and the Chinese government’s propaganda arm, which has made significant investments in exploiting social media to spread disinformation that benefits the Chinese Communist Party.
A report prepared by Forbes after reviewing the public employee LinkedIn profiles has revealed that around three hundred current employees at TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, previously worked for Chinese state media publications.
According to Forbes, the LinkedIn profiles of ByteDance and TikTok workers showed them in current responsibilities such as content partnerships, strategy, policy, public relations, monetisation, and ‘media collaboration.’
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Current ByteDance executives appear to have created 23 of these accounts, which control divisions supervising content partnerships, public affairs, corporate social responsibility, and “media collaboration.”
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At least 15 current ByteDance workers indicated that they worked for both the IT business and state media outlets at the same time.
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The report said late on Thursday that “Fifteen indicate that current ByteDance employees are also concurrently employed by Chinese state media entities, including Xinhua News Agency, China Radio International, and China Central/China Global Television,” the report said.
Forbes found “strong ties between TikTok’s parent business, ByteDance, and the Chinese government’s propaganda arm, which has been extensively utilising social media to propagate disinformation that supports the Chinese Communist Party.”
ByteDance and TikTok, according to the article, did not dispute that the 300 LinkedIn profiles were current workers or deny their ties to Chinese official media.
According to a ByteDance spokeswoman, the business makes “hiring choices based solely on an individual’s professional capacity to accomplish the job.”
Forbes discovered 49 LinkedIn accounts for former CCTV and CGTN workers at TikTok and ByteDance.
Among them were CCTV’s previous editor-in-chief, who is now ByteDance’s head of media content partnerships, and a ByteDance international market operator who, according to his biography, is still an editor for CCTV.
The growth of TikTok has raised concerns among US politicians about national security.
TikTok recently confirmed that staff outside the nation could access that information, while “strong cybersecurity safeguards and authorization” from the company’s US security team were necessary.
Buzzfeed News reported in June that TikTok users’ data in the United States was routinely accessed by personnel in China.
(With inputs from agencies)
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