TikTok's Parent, ByteDance, Made Fake Accounts With Content Scraped From Instagram And Snapchat, Former Employees Say

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2017, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, scraped short-form videos, usernames, profile pictures, and profile descriptions from Instagram, Snapchat, and other sources and then uploaded them -- without users' knowledge or consent -- to Flipagram, a TikTok predecessor, according to four former employees of the company. 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 China and began soon after ByteDance acquired Flipagram in January 2017. The former employees described the project as one of several "growth hacks" -- including the manipulation of like and video view statistics â" employed by the company.

One of the former employees said the scraping affected hundreds of thousands of accounts, and a document viewed by BuzzFeed News detailed plans to "crawl video > 10k/day in P0 countries" -- according to the former employee, this meant the team's goal was to scrape more than 10,000 videos a day in the highest priority countries. The former employees spoke to BuzzFeed News under the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from ByteDance. The former employees do not know when the scraping they say they were aware of stopped. Two of them say that the scraped content was used to train ByteDance's powerful "For You" personalization algorithm on US-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.

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[Tablizer]

Dude, you keep posting this. You are obsessed with "liberals". Get a life!

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[DrMrLordX]

It's just copypasta. Same as the idiot who keeps complaining about "the Internet today" and the swastika guy and the real master plan behind crypto blah blah blah

We had better trolls in the past. These no-effort losers aren't even remotely entertaining.

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[Rayfield k.]

I like the internet today guy, sometimes he switches it up a little and he's not wrong about some of it.

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[Tablizer]

I miss the You're-All-Cows Troll(s), actually, at least when they had a hit.

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[DrMrLordX]

He was a god among men. APK was also good for laughs.

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[SomePoorSchmuck]

Internet Today guy is right about most of it, though a few of the examples do sound likely to be self-fulfilling bans/shadowbans based more around him being a PITA to site admins than him being the brave lone holdout against the global panopticon dystopia. His examples and their diminution of human identity/agency are real things, they're just coalmine-canary things that 98% of people won't consciously notice. No question that he's hypersensitized to those issues to a level that is out on the far end of the

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[laxguy]

I think I just found my new copy-pasta

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[DrMrLordX]

You're over-thinking it. It's a parody of people who think of themselves in that fashion.

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[SomePoorSchmuck]

You're over-thinking it. It's a parody of people who think of themselves in that fashion.

Naturally!
Every civilization must ensure that its competitors are defined as absurd -- absurdly violent, absurdly emotional, absurdly over-thinking, absurdly old-fashioned, absurdly new-fangled, etc.

Civilization is not a building, or a road, or a house. Civilization is a contagious recursion - the recursive belief in the value and authority of Civilization. The buildings, roads, houses, are merely the cobwebs and bowers produced by the creature. That's why there have been thousands upon thousands of societi

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[DrMrLordX]

He's so whiny though. And it's just the same stupid complaints, albeit with occasional recomposition. It's too deadpan. How can a guy like that compete with stuff like goatse and penisbird?!?!

Google also

[Tablizer]

Google did something like this to me. They attempted to tie together their diverse services in their (failed) rush to beat FaceBook & Twitter. One service's info ended up in another, creating embarrassing situations, as personal-friend, family, and work info had a secret orgy and love children. They got stamped as full-ass PHB's in my book and I completely stopped trusting them.

(To be fair, there was probably some obscure fine-print or footnote that "warned" me about this, but as usual, I missed it.)

The "EVIL CHINA(tm)" again?

[fbobraga]

RED DANGER! COMMIES! /irony

Well, of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

... they learned to do this from LinkedIn, who specialized in scraping profiles from public information (like IETF forums and mailing lists) and spam/UCEing victims to "complete their signing-up" process to experience the "benefits" of LinkedIn.

Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

[bl968]

The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. "Dream would be to get stories with headlines like 'From dances to danger,' " one campaign director said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]

Im shocked

[e3m4n]

Shocked! I tell you! Shocked that any company would do something like this to make themselves appear more successful than they were. *cough* Worldcom *cough*.

Why

[dohzer]

Who needs fake accounts when you can boost the company's value by inserting this line into your code:
displayedViewCount = round(actualViewCount * 142.56);

Pinterest is doing the same thing for years

[Anonymous Coward]

but they are not Chaineez so then probably it's not seen as a problem.