TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance made fake accounts using content it scraped from Instagram and Snapchat, according to former employees, who described the project as one of several “growth hacks” implemented by the company. In 2017, ByteDance scraped videos, usernames, profile pictures, and profile descriptions from Instagram, Snapchat, and other sources, then uploaded them — without users’ knowledge or consent — to Flipagram, a TikTok predecessor, according to four former employees and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. TikTok Influencers film video (MIGUEL MEDINA /Getty) Mark Zuckerberg (Getty/Saul Loeb) Internal documents also indicated the scraping was run by an engineering team in China, and began soon after ByteDance acquired Flipagram in 2017. One of the former employees told BuzzFeed News the scraping affected hundreds of thousands of accounts, and that the goal was to scrape more than 10,000 videos a day in the highest priority countries. Two of the former employees added that the scraped content was used to train ByteDance’s “For You” personalization algorithm on U.S.-based content, so that it would better reflect the preferences of U.S. users. One document shows how ByteDance tried to select content that was “not too Chinese,” so that it would resonate with U.S. users. Currently, the “For You”…
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Report: TikTok Parent ByteDance Propped Up Prior Platform by Scraping Content from … – Breitbart
