The parent company of TikTok used a news app called Top Buzz to spread pro-China messages. The former employees told the publication that they were ordered by ByteDance to "pin" content that promoted China to the top of the app. They had to provide proof that they had complied with the company's orders in order to be allowed to stay. By the end of the year, TopBuzz had 40 million active users.
The former employees helped promote panda videos as well as travel to China. A staff member pinned a video with a white man talking about moving his startup to the country. One of the former employees said that the content ByteDance wanted them to promote was more of a soft sell. They said that this was something you could not say no to.
In addition to promoting pro-China content, former staff members claimed that TopBuzz had a review system that flags reports on the Chinese government for removal. They said the flagged content included coverage of Hong Kong protests, pieces that mention the president and even Winnie the Pooh. Some employees said that some of the content was removed.
The former employees' claims were denied by a ByteDance spokesman. They sent a statement to the website.
"The claim that TopBuzz — which was discontinued years ago — pinned pro-Chinese government content to the top of the app or worked to promote it is false and ridiculous. TopBuzz had over two dozen top tier US and UK media publishing partners, including BuzzFeed, which clearly did not find anything of concern when performing due diligence."
TikTok is alive and well even though TopBuzz was shut down. Authorities and critics have been worried that ByteDance would use TikTok to spread pro-China propaganda in the US. ByteDance employees in China had access to private information on TikTok users in the US, according to a June report. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr called on Apple and Google to ban the app for its pattern of surreptitious data practices, even though the company quickly migrated US user traffic to a new oracle cloud infrastructure.
Michael Beckerman, head of public policy for the Americas at TikTok, was asked if the app could be used to influence politics in the US. Beckerman said that TikTok is not a place for politics and that the main thing that people are using is entertainment. A lot of young people are using TikTok as their primary source of information.
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