LinkedIn Profiles Indicate 300 Current TikTok And ByteDance Employees Used To Work For Chinese State Media—And Some Still Do
Emily Baker-WhiteForbes Staff Aug 11, 2022,06:30am EDT
Three hundred current employees at TikTok and its parent company ByteDance previously worked for Chinese state media publications, according to public employee LinkedIn profiles reviewed by Forbes.
Twenty-three of these profiles appear to have been created by current ByteDance directors, who manage departments overseeing content partnerships, public affairs, corporate social responsibility and “media cooperation.”
Fifteen indicate that current ByteDance employees are also concurrently employed by Chinese state media entities, including Xinhua News Agency, China Radio International and China Central / China Global Television. (These organizations were among those designated by the State Department as “foreign government functionaries” in 2020.)
Fifty of the profiles represent employees that work for or on TikTok, including a content strategy manager who was formerly a Chief Correspondent for Xinhua News.
The LinkedIn profiles reviewed by Forbes reveal significant connections between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and the propaganda arm of the Chinese government, which has been investing heavily in using social media to amplify disinformation that serves the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese state media outlets have a large presence on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but so far, they have been relatively quiet on TikTok.
Unlike the other major platforms, however, TikTok does not currently label accounts controlled by Chinese state media. In March, TikTok announced a plan to label “some” state media entities, but a Forbes review of China’s largest state media entities on the platform, including China News Service, Xinhua News Service, CGTN and the Global Times, found no added context or labels indicating the accounts’ state control. (Disclosure: In a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)
ByteDance and TikTok did not contest that the 300 LinkedIn profiles represent current employees or deny their connections to Chinese state media. None of the state media outlets named in this story responded to a request for comment.
Jennifer Banks, a spokesperson for ByteDance, said that ByteDance makes “hiring decisions based purely on an individual’s professional capability to do the job. For our China-market businesses, that includes people who have previously worked in government or state media positions in China. Outside of China, employees also bring experience in government, public policy, and media organizations from dozens of markets."
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/08/10/bytedance-tiktok-china-state-media-propaganda/