ByteDance, owner of hit short-video app TikTok and its Chinese sibling Douyin, has internally disclosed 61 misconduct cases involving employees who were fired or charged by authorities for accepting bribes, leaking data and claiming expenses inappropriately, among other wrongdoings.
Four employees were detained or released on bail, including former Douyin worker Lu Yang, who accepted “large sums of kickbacks from external partners”, according to an internal email sent on Sunday that was seen by the Post. Lu, who joined ByteDance in 2018, was in charge of digital music rights, his LinkedIn profile shows.
Lu, together with three other arrested employees, has been blacklisted by the Trust and Integrity Enterprise Alliance and Enterprise Anti-fraud Alliance, according to the email. The two major professional ethics groups in China each has more than 100 member companies.
A ByteDance representative confirmed the content of the email. Lu did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via LinkedIn. The Post was unable to reach other people named in ByteDance’s email.
Other problematic cases identified by ByteDance were classified as violations of the “integrity and honesty system”, “conflict of interest regime” and “information security system”.
In one case, Guo Qiyang, an e-commerce department employee, conducted private training for merchants and earned 200,000 yuan (US$27,600) in the process.
Wang Kunyan from the video-editing-platform team CapCut “leaked company information to rivals” between August 2023 and February 2024.
Bao Yizhi with the local services team stole items belonging to his colleagues and sold them for 3,404 yuan.
More than a dozen cases involved employees who claimed transport, accommodation and meal expenses for purposes unrelated to work.
Like other Big Tech firms in China, ByteDance has been closely monitoring employee behaviour. In March, its Douyin business unit, which also oversees news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and other popular content-feed apps in China, said it reported 23 staff members to the police and dismissed 136 employees for bribery and embezzlement last year.
ByteDance’s peers have made similar moves.
Social media and video gaming giant Tencent Holdings last year reported nearly 20 employees to the police and sacked more than 120 others over some 70 misconduct cases. Also in 2023, food delivery and local services operator
Meituan said it assisted the police with the criminal investigations of 93 people.
