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However, another former employee told BuzzFeed News that they recalled conversations about resizing videos and removing watermarks placed on content by other platforms, so that users could not tell that the scraped content originated elsewhere. This person expressed doubt that the platform was scraped because at least some Instagram videos at the time were square in shape, and videos in the Flipagram app were not. One of the former employees who identified Snapchat and Musical.ly as sources of the scraping did not identify Instagram as one. Two of the former employees remember the company scraping and uploading content from Snapchat and Musical.ly - an app popular with tweens and teens that ByteDance acquired in late 2017, and that would eventually become TikTok.
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Three of the former employees, and one of the documents, identify Instagram as a source of the scraped content. In mid-2017, according to the four former employees, ByteDance began scraping and reuploading content from the US. One document details how the company tried to curate content that was “not too Chinese” and would resonate with US users, but three of the former employees say the content still didn’t perform well with Flipagram’s user base. A third document lists account scraping as an “OKR” (‘objective and key result’) for an engineering team in China.Īccording to the documents, ByteDance began copying content from some of its China-focused short-form video apps and uploading it to Flipagram through fake accounts in early 2017. In another document, a different employee explains that a certain account had been scraped and copied onto Flipagram from Instagram. In one document, an employee lays out the reasons that the company used “fake accounts” and scraped content among them were that the accounts could be used to test which content performed best on the platform, and that current users could mimic the scraped content to improve their own popularity. The documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News include explicit references to scraped content and the use of fake accounts.
Dilley reiterated that the company had not scraped other platforms during his time there. BuzzFeed News sent Dilley a follow-up email asking for him to elaborate on his answer and explain his understanding of what was happening at the time. When asked whether the company had been scraping and reuploading content in 2017, he replied, “No, in fact I’m positive we were not.” He then ended the interview. BuzzFeed News did reach Brian Dilley, who was Flipagram’s chief technology officer until October 2017, at his home. Flipagram and Vigo ceased operations years ago and aren't connected to any current ByteDance products.”įlipagram founder and former CEO Farhad Mohit did not respond to requests for comment, nor did his cofounders Raffi Baghoomian and Joshua Feldman. In response, ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks wrote back two sentences: “ByteDance acquired Flipagram in 2017 and operated it, and subsequently Vigo, for a short time. (Disclosure: In a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.) Today, the “For You” algorithm powers both TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin. 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. The former employees do not know when the scraping they say they were aware of stopped. The former employees spoke to BuzzFeed News under the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution from ByteDance. 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 described the project as one of several “growth hacks” - including the manipulation of like and video view statistics - employed by the company. 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.īuzzFeed 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.