BuzzFeed News spoke with four former ByteDance employees, all of whom worked at Flipagram (later renamed Vigo Video), and released internal documents indicating that the scraping was done by a team of engineers in China and began shortly after Flipagram was acquired by byteDance in January 2017. Former employees described the project as one of many “development hackers” – including “like” statistics manipulation and video projection – used by the company. One of the former employees said that the scrap had affected hundreds of thousands of accounts and a document viewed by BuzzFeed News had detailed plans for “video scanning> 10k / day in P0 countries” – according to the former official, this meant that her goal was team was to write more than 10,000 videos a day in the top priority countries. The former employees spoke to BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from ByteDance.
Former employees do not know when the scratching they say they knew stopped. Two of them say that the clipped content was used to train ByteDance’s powerful “For You” personalization algorithm on US-based content to better reflect US users’ preferences. Today, the “For You” algorithm powers both TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin. (Revelation: In a previous life, I held policy posts on Facebook and Spotify.)
BuzzFeed News has sent ByteDance a comprehensive list of the claims we intended to print in this article, as well as a detailed set of questions, including whether any Flipagram datasets were ever used to train the For You algorithm. TikTok today or for training any other algorithm currently used by ByteDance.
In response, ByteDance spokeswoman Jennifer Banks wrote two phrases: “ByteDance acquired Flipagram in 2017 and launched it, and then Vigo, for a short time. Flipagram and Vigo were discontinued years ago and are not affiliated with any current ByteDance product. “
Flipagram founder and former CEO Farhad Mohit did not respond to requests for comment, nor did co-founders Raffi Baghoomian and Joshua Feldman. BuzzFeed News reached out to Brian Dilley, who was Flipagram’s chief technology officer until October 2017, at his home. When asked if the company had cut and re-uploaded content in 2017, he replied: “No, in fact I’m sure we were not.” Then he finished the interview. BuzzFeed News sent Dilley a follow-up email asking him to explain his response in detail and to explain that he understood what was happening at the time. Dilley reiterated that the company had not scratched other platforms during his stay there.
Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News include clear references to clipped content and the use of fake accounts. In a document, an employee states the reasons why the company used “fake accounts” and corrupted content. Among these were that accounts could be used to control which content performed best on the platform and that current users could mimic clipped content to improve their popularity. In another document, a different employee explains that a specific account was cut and copied to Flipagram from Instagram. A third document lists the scraping as “OKR” (“objective and basic result”) for a team of engineers in China.
According to the documents, ByteDance started copying content from some China-based short video applications and uploading it to Flipagram via fake accounts in early 2017. A document describes how the company tried to edit content that was not very Chinese . and would resonate with US users, but three of the former employees say the content is still not performing well with the Flipagram user base.
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The ByteDance logo appears at the company headquarters on January 6, 2022, in Shanghai, China.
In mid-2017, according to the four former employees, ByteDance began scamming and uploading content from the US again. Three of the former employees and one of the documents identify Instagram as the source of the clipped content. Two of the former employees recall that the company scammed and uploaded content from Snapchat and Musical.ly – a popular app for kids and teens acquired by ByteDance in late 2017 that would eventually become TikTok.
One of the former employees who identified Snapchat and Musical.ly as sources of scraping did not identify Instagram as one. This person doubted that the platform had been scrapped because at least some Instagram videos at the time were square and Flipagram videos were not. However, another former employee told BuzzFeed News that they recalled discussions about resizing videos and removing watermarks placed on content from other platforms so that users could not say that the clipped content came from elsewhere.
The terms of service of Instagram and Snap banned scratching in 2017, as it is today. At the time, Musical.ly’s terms of service prohibited users from “mac[ing] unauthorized copies of any content available on or through the platform.
Jason Grosse, a spokesman for Instagram’s parent company Meta, said the company would not comment at this time. Russ Caditz-Peck, a spokesman for Snap, said: “Our Terms of Service prohibit the scraping and republishing of public content by our services and we take defenses to limit such attempts.”
In other cases, allegations that companies have cut and reused content without permission have led to litigation, both by the companies and individuals who created the content. (Scraping, which simply means using a computer to copy information on a scale, can also be an invaluable research tool for researchers and journalists looking to better study and analyze public content.) Companies that have used fake accounts for to entice users to The platforms have also been sued by state and federal regulators for misleading business practices.
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The former Flipagram headquarters on Sunset Avenue in West Hollywood on July 16, 2014.
Some noticed that their content had been uploaded to Flipagram without their knowledge or consent, according to the four former employees and complaints made on Twitter. The four former employees told BuzzFeed News that the company received emails from creators who said they were impersonating the application. Two of these people remember questions from parents asking why their children’s content was on a platform that neither they nor their children had ever heard. The four sources reported that officials were instructed to delete the offensive accounts or give the complainant control over them and tell complaining creators that Flipagram could not prevent a user (or fan) from uploading someone else’s content.
The former employees also described other “development hacks” that ByteDance tried to make Flipagram popular in 2017. According to three of the former employees, the company manipulated the like views and videos displayed in the app to make creators believe that they were more popular than they were. “A like was not a like,” said a former employee who saw the manipulation. (Facebook has faced similar claims that it knowingly inflated video projection metrics to increase advertising revenue, something it has disputed.)
“A like was not a like.”
According to an internal document, ByteDance also reduced video views of removed content to a certain level. One of the former employees explained that this was done so that the content views did not overwhelm content posted by real Flipagram users. In addition, according to two sources, Flipagram limited how often it would recommend “cross-posting” – content that is first published on other platforms and then republished on Flipagram – to motivate creators to post content first on Flipagram and only later on other platforms .
ByteDance did not answer questions about measurement manipulation and flipagram recommendations.
Flipagram was founded in Los Angeles by Farhad Mohit in 2013 as a photo and video collage application. It attracted a young audience — to a large extent teenagers and adolescents — and …
