![]() ![]() William Evanina, former head of counterintelligence for the U.S. but they're not beholden to the CIA or the NSA.” “Yes, Facebook and Google all do the same things to protect their global assets. The Justice Department in April charged dozens of police officers tied to the Chinese government with doing just that. who’ve spoken out online against the Chinese Communist Party, including by commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The Chinese government has used social media to target people in the U.S. (At least one of the people running that project was an engineer in Beijing.) Favazza, the TikTok spokesperson, said that tracking data on hits of sensitive or prohibited words “simply helps us understand performance” and that “access is restricted.” ![]() One document mentioning TikTok and other ByteDance products describes a recent upgrade that integrated the moderation system with “a new text detection service,” making it easier to track and analyze “hit records of sensitive words” in real-time. ![]() Levine, on Signal/WhatsApp at (310) 526–1242, or email her at show the moderation tools and other internal programs also collect data on the “hit rate” of sensitive words, including information about U.S. Got a tip about TikTok or ByteDance? Reach out securely to the author, Alexandra S. “Some of these customizations can be turned on or off” in different locations, according to the report, but experts told Forbes it’s nearly impossible to guarantee Douyin’s restrictive settings are switched off for TikTok. (Favazza said TikTok could not verify whether any TikTok employees had accessed the tool without knowing their names.)Ī 2021 Citizen Lab report also found that TikTok and Douyin “share many parts of their source code,” built on a common base and tweaked based on the market. Along with TikTok employees having access to the ByteDance tool in the last year, documents also show that ByteDance employees in China are among those who’ve managed the TikTok tool. And hundreds of documents reviewed by Forbes show a lack of functional separation internally in access to information, user data and tools-including their sensitive keyword systems. Teams who manage moderation for China-only platforms and non-China platforms are different and separate employed by different entities and have separate tools for moderation."ĭozens of current and former TikTok and ByteDance employees have told Forbes that any purported separation between the two companies is largely cosmetic. Spokesperson Jennifer Banks said only that "Jiyun Hudong, which is a subsidiary of Douyin Information Service Co., Ltd., manages operations in relation to our China platforms' content moderation, including that of Douyin's. ByteDance also did not respond to repeated questions about the meaning of lists like “Trump Directed Prohibited Words,” “Theming Strategies of Uyghur-Han Couples” “YouTube Domestic Surveillance” and “Thematic Strategy for China’s Strategic Policy,” or who created them and how they’re being used.Įxperts told Forbes it’s nearly impossible to guarantee Douyin’s restrictive settings are switched off for TikTok. MORE FROM FORBES TikTok's China Problem By Emily Baker-WhiteīyteDance did not respond to questions about whether the word lists apply to Douyin or ByteDance’s other products-which include Lemon8 and CapCut, apps that have recently exploded in popularity in the U.S. “These apps use separate keyword platforms and keyword lists that are managed by separate teams." ByteDance and TikTok’s sensitive keywords system-which until recently shared the same name-was split in 2019, according to Favazza, who said TikTok’s version of the tool has been operated separately ever since. "TikTok and Douyin are different apps, in different markets, with separate content policies and source code,” she said in a statement. Asked why these lists have “TikTok” or “US” in their names if they were never used on the platform, Favazza said “I can not speculate on the list titles” without Forbes turning over documents. TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza suggested the extensive materials obtained by Forbes could be “significantly outdated or incomplete” and said none of the word lists identified by Forbes in this story are currently or have ever been used on TikTok. Other lists explicitly reference TikTok’s Chinese counterpart Douyin, as well as ByteDance products Lark, Toutiao and Resso. Forbes found more than 50 lists in the ByteDance tool with the word “TikTok” or “U.S.” in the title, and internal materials show that the tool was accessed by TikTok employees in the last year. ![]()
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