A U.S.-based employee of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, told an undercover Project Veritas journalist that he is sure a lot of TikTok’s coding is “very beneficial to China,” and said the Washington, D.C. team works “directly with the FBI” to “take down” people like Andrew Tate.
After the Project Veritas journalist asked TikTok content monitor Bruce Sapp why he thinks the U.S. government wants to ban TikTok from government officials’ devices, the ByteDance employee said, “If I had to guess, it’s because I’m sure a lot of the coding is still very beneficial to China.”
“And because of the whole China-America relationship. I’m sure it’s something to do with those,” he added.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Sapp said that a lot of the company’s Washington, D.C. team works “directly with the FBI.”
“The D.C. team is nuts, I was looking at their job descriptions… nuts,” he said. “A lot of them work directly with the FBI, so you need, like, a certain amount of, like, training, like, it’s nuts.”
Sapp explained:
You have to train, like, a year with [the] FBI — because things they do are more of like — I don’t know if you’ve heard, but, like, Andrew Tate getting taken down in Romania. So, like, it would be more of that shit, like, people who are on TikTok that are obviously wanted criminals — working with the police, like helping them find their locations, shit like that.
The ByteDance employee went on to assert that social media platforms like TikTok need to moderate content from people like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and influencer Andrew Tate, because “people are too dumb to do their own research.”
I think the thing with social media, which is very scary, is you have a lot of people like parents, older generations, or even people who are just too dumb to do their own research, they have certain people that they follow, whether it be, like, the Andrew Tate’s of the world, the Tucker Carlson’s, the whoever. And whatever they say, they take as law.
“So, it’s important for us as a social media company to have these [moderation] policies in play so we can do our best to keep false information off the internet,” Sapp said.
“Once you have somebody like Andrew Tate, you have so many people that follow him. He’s a piece of shit, he’s a dickhead. But there’s so many people who are like, ‘Yeah, like, no, he knows everything,’” the ByteDance employee continued.
Sapp then went on to state that taking down this type of content will curtail groups like “the KKK.”
“If we can take that content down, we can minimize the potential for, you know, more outward groups like the KKK, the Proud Boys, all those people, like, that’s pretty much all we’re trying to do,” he said.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.