How to Upload Tik Tok Videos to Buzzfeed
TikTok's Parent, ByteDance, Fabricated False Accounts With Content Scraped From Instagram And Snapchat, Former Employees Say
The Red china-based company scraped public accounts and then duplicated them on Flipagram, a predecessor to TikTok, according to four former employees and documents viewed past BuzzFeed News.
In 2017, TikTok'due south parent company, ByteDance, scraped short-form videos, usernames, profile pictures, and contour descriptions from Instagram, Snapchat, and other sources then uploaded them — without users' knowledge or consent — to Flipagram, a TikTok predecessor, according to 4 former employees of the visitor.
BuzzFeed News spoke with the four former ByteDance employees, all of whom worked on Flipagram (later renamed Vigo Video), and viewed internal documents that indicate the scraping was run by an engineering team in Prc and began presently afterwards ByteDance acquired Flipagram in January 2017. The former employees described the project as ane of several "growth hacks" — including the manipulation of like and video view statistics — employed by the company. One of the onetime employees said the scraping afflicted hundreds of thousands of accounts, and a document viewed by BuzzFeed News detailed plans to "clamber video > 10k/day in P0 countries" — according to the former employee, this meant the squad's goal was to scrape more than than 10,000 videos a 24-hour interval in the highest priority countries. The former employees spoke to BuzzFeed News nether the condition of anonymity considering they feared retribution from ByteDance.
The one-time employees practice not know when the scraping they say they were aware of stopped. Ii of them say that the scraped content was used to train ByteDance's powerful "For Y'all" personalization algorithm on U.s.-based content so that it would better reflect the preferences of US users. Today, the "For You" algorithm powers both TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin. (Disclosure: In a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)
BuzzFeed News sent ByteDance a comprehensive list of the allegations we intended to print in this article as well as a detailed ready of questions, including if data sets from Flipagram were ever used to train the "For Y'all" algorithm that powers TikTok today or to train any other algorithms currently in employ by ByteDance.
In response, ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks wrote back two sentences: "ByteDance acquired Flipagram in 2017 and operated it, and after Vigo, for a brusk time. Flipagram and Vigo ceased operations years ago and aren't continued to whatever current ByteDance products."
Flipagram founder and one-time CEO Farhad Mohit did not answer to requests for comment, nor did his cofounders Raffi Baghoomian and Joshua Feldman. BuzzFeed News did reach Brian Dilley, who was Flipagram's chief engineering officer until October 2017, at his home. When asked whether the company had been scraping and reuploading content in 2017, he replied, "No, in fact I'm positive we were not." He then concluded the interview. BuzzFeed News sent Dilley a follow-upward email request for him to elaborate on his answer and explicate his understanding of what was happening at the time. Dilley reiterated that the company had not scraped other platforms during his time there.
The documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News include explicit references to scraped content and the use of faux accounts. In 1 document, an employee lays out the reasons that the company used "imitation accounts" and scraped content; among them were that the accounts could be used to test which content performed all-time on the platform, and that electric current users could mimic the scraped content to improve their own popularity. In another document, a different employee explains that a certain business relationship had been scraped and copied onto Flipagram from Instagram. A tertiary document lists account scraping as an "OKR" ('objective and key result') for an engineering science team in China.
Co-ordinate to the documents, ByteDance began copying content from some of its China-focused curt-form video apps and uploading it to Flipagram through fake accounts in early 2017. One document details how the company tried to curate content that was "not too Chinese" and would resonate with Usa users, only 3 of the former employees say the content still didn't perform well with Flipagram'south user base.
Vcg / VCG via Getty Images
The ByteDance logo is seen at the company'southward headquarters on Jan. 6, 2022, in Shanghai, China.
In mid-2017, co-ordinate to the four former employees, ByteDance began scraping and reuploading content from the U.s.. Three of the former employees, and one of the documents, identify Instagram as a source of the scraped content. 2 of the former employees remember the visitor scraping and uploading content from Snapchat and Musical.ly — an app popular with tweens and teens that ByteDance caused in late 2017, and that would eventually become TikTok.
One of the former employees who identified Snapchat and Musical.ly equally sources of the scraping did not identify Instagram as one. This person expressed doubt that the platform was scraped considering at least some Instagram videos at the fourth dimension were square in shape, and videos in the Flipagram app were not. However, another old employee told BuzzFeed News that they recalled conversations about resizing videos and removing watermarks placed on content past other platforms, so that users could non tell that the scraped content originated elsewhere.
Instagram'south and Snap's terms of service forbade scraping in 2017, equally they do today. At the time, Musical.ly'south terms of service prohibited users from "mak[ing] unauthorized copies of any content made bachelor on or through" the platform.
Jason Grosse, a representative for Instagram'due south parent company Meta, said the visitor would not comment at this time. Russ Caditz-Peck, a spokesperson for Snap, said, "Our Terms of Service prohibit scraping and reposting public content from our services, and we implement defenses to limit such attempts."
In other circumstances, allegations that companies have scraped and reused content without permission have spurred litigation, both by companies and individuals who fabricated the content in question. (Scraping, or itch, which simply means using a computer to copy data at calibration, can also be an invaluable enquiry tool for researchers and journalists seeking to amend study and clarify public content.) Companies that accept used faux accounts to lure users to their platforms have also been sued past state and federal regulators for deceptive business practices.
Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Flipagram's former headquarters on Dusk Boulevard in Due west Hollywood on July sixteen, 2014.
Some people noticed that their content had been uploaded to Flipagram without their noesis or consent, according to the 4 former employees and complaints made on Twitter. The four former employees told BuzzFeed News that the company received emails from creators who said they were being impersonated on the app. 2 of those people call back inquiries from parents request why their children'south content was on a platform that neither they nor their children had ever heard of. The four sources said employees were instructed to delete the offending accounts or give the person complaining command over them, and tell the complaining creators that Flipagram cannot prevent a user (or fan) from uploading someone else's content.
The former employees as well described other "growth hacks" that ByteDance used to try to make Flipagram pop in 2017. According to 3 of the former employees, the visitor manipulated like and video view counts displayed in the app to make creators believe they were more popular than they were. "One like was not one like," said a former employee who witnessed the manipulation. (Facebook has faced similar allegations that it knowingly inflated video view metrics to increase advertizing revenue, which it has disputed.)
"One like was not ane like."
According to an internal document, ByteDance also capped video views from scraped content at a sure level; one of the former employees explained this was so that scraped content views would not overwhelm content posted by real Flipagram users. Additionally, co-ordinate to two sources, Flipagram express how ofttimes it would recommend "cross-posts" — content posted first to other platforms, and and so reposted to Flipagram — to incentivize creators to mail content first to Flipagram and simply later to other platforms.
ByteDance did not respond to questions near manipulation of metrics and recommendations practices for Flipagram.
One erstwhile employee portrayed ByteDance's growth tactics as a symptom of a larger, industry-wide obsession with growth at any toll. "The US public and US media ofttimes attribute unethical growth strategies practiced by Chinese tech companies to 'Chinese tech culture,' when very often those tactics are direct copied from FAANG companies," they said, using an acronym for the American tech giants Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. Invoking Steve Jobs' famous quote that "great artists steal," and Mark Zuckerberg's controversial axiom "movement fast and break things," this person continued: "Chinese tech culture is non the enemy. Chinese tech culture is an honest mirror."
Flipagram was founded in Los Angeles by Farhad Mohit in 2013 every bit a photo collage and short-form video app. It attracted a young audition — largely teens and tweens — and was once viewed as a threat to Instagram. In January 2017, it was acquired by ByteDance's news aggregator app, Toutiao, which later rebranded it as Vigo Video. Later that year, ByteDance also acquired the lip-synching app Musical.ly, one of Flipagram's key rivals.
For a while, staff for the two apps worked alongside one another in Flipagram's open-program part building in Los Angeles. The onetime employees described the menstruum every bit awkward; as 1 onetime employee put it, the teams' history of competition "led to an uncomfortable and very uncollaborative free energy in the workplace." The products, the source said, "were so like I don't call up anyone felt like ByteDance was going to put their funding fully behind both." In February 2018, ByteDance laid off members of the LA-based Flipagram team. Months afterwards, it rebranded Musical.ly as TikTok.
"Chinese tech culture is not the enemy. Chinese tech culture is an honest mirror."
The relationship between Flipagram and TikTok is described differently by dissimilar people. On his website and LinkedIn profile, Flipagram founder Mohit describes Flipagram as "now TikTok." Flipagram'southward visitor profile on LinkedIn describes it the same way. But when ByteDance rolled out TikTok in the US, information technology was Musical.ly users, non Flipagram users, who opened their apps to a new proper noun, logo, and experience.
ByteDance as well did not answer questions from BuzzFeed News about where and how it stored any information it allegedly scraped from Instagram and other platforms. TikTok has undergone a massive initiative in the past year to isolate data from users within the US in an effort to quell regulators' fears that the data could be accessed by the Chinese regime. But information technology is unclear whether data from Flipagram — including the allegedly scraped data — was ever kept in data centers in People's republic of china, or whether it remains in that location today.
When reached for annotate by BuzzFeed News most the declared scraping, Sen. Richard Blumenthal called on regulators to investigate: "The FTC must swiftly investigate ByteDance's alleged theft of data from Instagram and Snapchat users — including kids and teens — to deceive the public and boost their algorithm. This blazon of wrongful and greedy corporate acquit only underscores the urgent demand for Congress to pass stronger kids' privacy and safety legislation."
"The FTC must swiftly investigate ByteDance's alleged theft of data from Instagram and Snapchat users."
This is not the start time ByteDance has been accused of controversial intellectual property practices. Terminal twelvemonth, competing Chinese tech giant Tencent filed numerous claims against ByteDance for declared copyright infringement on its Douyin app. Audiovisual software company Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co. also filed a suit alleging that the company stole, and removed copyright restrictive linguistic communication from, proprietary code. (ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment on either of the suits.) The company has also faced privacy lawsuits in the past: ByteDance agreed to pay $92 million last year to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company harvested biometric information from TikTok users without permission. When asked for comment past the Associated Printing at the time, TikTok provided the following argument: "While we disagree with the assertions, rather than go through lengthy litigation, we'd like to focus our efforts on building a prophylactic and joyful experience for the TikTok community."
Flipagram had a fraught history with intellectual property too, even before ByteDance acquired it. In 2016, CEO Farhad Mohit admitted that the company had initially allowed users to create content using music that the platform did not have the correct to play. In an interview with Recode at the time, Mohit revealed his thinking on bending rules in search of growth.
"We did it kind of like entrepreneurs do sometimes, we kind of merely did it and [decided] nosotros'd ask for permission after." ●
Sarah Emerson and Sal Hernandez contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/bytedance-scraped-fake-accounts-instagram-snapchat
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