TikTok, hundreds of employees work or have worked for the Chinese state

Hundreds of employees of ByteDance, the company it controls TikTok, have worked or still work for media and publications of the Chinese state, at least according to their LinkedIn profiles. To reveal it is ainvestigation from Forbes. Among these organizations appear Xinhua News Agency, China Radio International And China Central / China Global Television, identified by the US State Department as foreign missionsor entities “substantially owned and de facto controlled by a foreign government“.

Fifty of the profiles identified belong to working people directly on TikTok in various areas, including policy, strategy, monetization and content localization. Among these, there is also a “content strategy manager” who in the past was correspondent in chief for Xinhua News. Another employee, now deputy head of the media partnership of ByteDance, he previously held the role of social media manager of the china.org.cn website, a portal run by the Chinese state that spreads social media posts with titles such as “Enthusiasm for human rights is not good for either the United States or China“.

Fifteen of the profiles analyzed by Forbes they belong to individuals who currently hold positions at both ByteDance and the government media of China. A ByteDance spokesperson told a Forbes that the company does not allow its employees to have other work commitments that could cause conflicts of interest with their primary job. In addition to TikTok – which is currently the most downloaded app in the world – ByteDance also manages other services, including the news aggregator Toutiao. On Douyin, the name by which the app is known in China, state media accounts are among those with the most followers.

Despite fears that these employees’ work ties to the Chinese propaganda machine could affect how content is produced and distributed on the app, neither ByteDance nor TikTok have made any statements on the matter at this time. According to an expert interviewed by Forbesswitching from Chinese state media to ByteDance would be a fairly common career path in China, even if the possible relations with former employers and with the government of the People’s Republic certainly remain problematic.

Today TikTok plays a critical role in the formation of public opinion and in the dissemination of information, both in the Western world and globally. The platform – which enjoys great popularity among the younger generations, even as an alternative search engine to Google – is not new to controversy. In June, an article by Buzzfeed had raised suspicions that ByteDance’s Chinese employees had access to American user data, a hypothesis later confirmed from the same company. Recently, several testimonies reported that the content moderators of the platform were forced to view child pornography images as part of their training. In Italy, meanwhile, the Privacy Guarantor has suspended personalized advertisements on the app, to protect the confidentiality of user data and avoid exposing minors to inappropriate content.