Former ByteDance employees accuse the company of using user-generated content, handles and profile pictures on competing social platforms to hone the algorithm of its former Flipagram app.
A practice present since the acquisition of the application by ByteDance
Founded in 2013 by Farhad Mohit in Los Angeles, the short video sharing app was acquired by the Chinese internet giant in 2017 and later renamed Vigo Video.
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From then on, what Flipagram calls a ” development technique “. The goal of the latter was to steal more than 10,000 videos per day in order to allow the application to flourish quickly.
Former employees of the Chinese company report that the content was collected from Instagram, Snapchat, and Musical.ly, without the knowledge of the users. The looting of Instagram is, however, disputed by one of the sources. The difference in video formats between the two applications made the operation incompatible.
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The stolen content was then uploaded to Flipagram in order to train the algorithm to recognize popular content in the United States and better reflect the preferences of American users. Two former employees assure that it is the same algorithm used for the content recommendation of the section “ For you “, used by TikTok, but also its Chinese equivalent, Douyin.
Subjected to a list of questions from Buzzfeed NewsJennifer Banks, spokesperson for ByteDance, said: ByteDance acquired Flipagram in 2017 and operated it and Vigo Video for a short time. Flipagram and Vigo went out of business years ago and are not related to any current ByteDance products. »
Response from users and competitors
When some people realized that the company was impersonating them, Flipagram instructed its employees to delete the fake profiles or give control of them to the real owners.
To combat these practices, Snapchat and Instagram have prohibited the theft of their users’ content since 2017. ” Our Terms of Service prohibit stealing and reposting of public content from our Services, and we have mechanisms in place to limit attempts explains Russ Caditz-Peck, Snap’s spokesperson.
This is not the first accusation of intellectual property theft for the Chinese company estimated at 400 billion dollars. Last year, ByteDance was ordered to pay $1.2 million to Tencent for copyright infringement by streaming videos of the game Honor of Kings on its Douyin app.