ByteDance

Department of Justice filed lawsuit alleging TikTok collected personal data from millions of children under 13 without parental consent, built backdoors allowing children to bypass age verification, and failed to honor deletion requests.

TikTok implemented multiple layoff rounds: May 2024 saw 'large swaths' of operations and marketing workforce cut from roughly 1,000 affected employees; May and July 2025 saw over 100 TikTok Shop e-commerce employees fired or left with US team members replaced by personnel from China and Singapore; August 2025 saw 'several hundred' UK content moderators replaced by AI-powered alternatives; October 2025 saw approximately 15 TikTok Music employees in the US and Latin America terminated.

In December 2022, ByteDance confirmed employees used TikTok to track the location of journalists reporting critically on the company through their IP addresses. ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo said the misconduct 'significantly undermined' public trust. The company fired four employees including chief internal auditor Chris Lepitak, while executive Song Ye resigned. The DOJ opened a criminal investigation led by the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Leaked audio from 80+ internal TikTok meetings published by BuzzFeed in June 2022 revealed China-based ByteDance employees repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users. The recordings contained 14 statements from nine employees indicating engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022. One employee stated 'Everything is seen in China.' A 2024 DOJ filing confirmed TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive US user data that wound up stored on Chinese servers.

On July 7, 2020, ByteDance announced it would withdraw TikTok from the Hong Kong market following the National Security Law's passage. A TikTok spokesperson stated users in Hong Kong would no longer be able to download or use the app. The withdrawal avoided putting ByteDance in the position of either refusing Chinese government data requests (risking mainland operations) or complying with requests that could identify protesters. This was notable given ByteDance's Chinese ownership and mainland China operations.

Musical.ly (TikTok's predecessor) settled FTC allegations of illegally collecting personal information from children under 13 without parental consent. At the time, it was the largest civil penalty ever obtained in a children's privacy case.

ByteDance established an internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee in 2014. Vice President Zhang Fuping serves as the company's CCP Committee Secretary. According to a report submitted to the Australian Parliament, Zhang stated that ByteDance should 'transmit the correct political direction, public opinion guidance and value orientation into every business and product line.' In 2018, founder Zhang Yiming publicly apologized after China shut down ByteDance's app Neihan Duanzi, stating the app was 'incommensurate with socialist core values.'