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Mr. Macagno- Content Manager

Mr. Santos- Content Developer

Mr. Kluger- Contract Manager

Mr. Singer- Project Manager

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ByteDance's influence extends beyond borders, contributing significantly to the economies of the countries it operates in. However, its global presence brings about challenges, including adherence to diverse political and legal frameworks. The company addresses these challenges by investing in content moderation, data privacy measures, and compliance strategies. ByteDance's success lies in its ability to balance technological innovation with cultural sensitivity, making its platforms, notably TikTok, widely popular on a global scale.

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ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has reshaped the social media landscape with its innovative approach. Operating globally, ByteDance's platforms influence cultural trends, providing a space for creative expression and connection. The company strategically adapts to political, economic, and legal challenges, demonstrating agility in a dynamic market. Through advanced technological integration, ByteDance enhances user experiences, staying at the forefront of the social media industry.

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ByteDance acquired Music.ly a famous Chinese short-formed video platform in November 2017. Later Music.ly was Merged with Tik-Tok, BytDance's short-formed video platform, in august 2018. Before Music.ly, ByteDance wasn't a big company and this is what really shot them up and gave them a lot of success.

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History of ByteDance

ByteDance was founded in 2012 by a team led by Yiming Zhang and Rubo Liang, who saw opportunities in the then-nascent mobile internet market, and aspired to build platforms that could enrich people's lives. The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. It followed that success with the launch of Douyin in September 2016. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok. It quickly took off in markets like Southeast Asia, signaling a new opportunity for the company. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 and subsequently merged it with TikTok. Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form mobile videos worldwide.

In support of its mission to Inspire Creativity and Enrich Life, ByteDance has made it easy and fun for people to connect with, create and consume content. People are also able to discover and transact with a suite of more than a dozen products and services such as TikTok, CapCut, TikTok Shop, Lark, Pico and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, as well as products and services specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, Fanqie, Xigua, Feishu and Douyin E-commerce.

ByteDance has over 150,000 employees based out of nearly 120 cities globally, including Austin, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, and Tokyo.

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ByteDance is a technology company operating a range of content platforms that inform, educate, entertain and inspire people across languages, cultures and geographies.

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This app by ByteDance is a strong competitor in the Chinese news scene. they have over 300 million user to this day. but there are problems with it. articles saying it is delivering fake news.https://www.britannica.com/topic/ByteDance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toutiao

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This article was originally published on Technode.com
Over the last year, few Chinese tech firms have made a bigger splash than news aggregator Jinri Toutiao. Leaping from relative obscurity just a few short years ago, the app has become a magnet for Chinese eyeballs, with over 120 million daily active users, who spend an average of 74 minutes per day on the platform.

What my Chinese friends (and Toutiao's investors) seem to like so much about it is its use of machine learning to recommend content to its users based on their preferences and habits. Since the majority of the media I consume is in English, I hadn't had much of an opportunity to see how its algorithms work. That changed recently when I downloaded TopBuzz, the English-language app of Jinri Toutiao's parent company, Bytedance. While Topbuzz's user interface is a bit different, it relies on the same core back-end architecture as its Chinese sibling to deliver a tailored content stream to its users.

What's been my experience? Well, simply put, it's been a consistent and reliable multi-course meal of just about every variety of fake news.

First, there were headlines that were simply false.

On December 12th, in a tightly-contested special election for an Alabama senate seat, Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore. A few hours after the major news networks declared that Jones had won, I received this article in a push notification from TopBuzz:

While every credible news outlet in the world was reporting Jones' victory, TopBuzz was sending me updates from little-known far-right-wing news site One America News Network.

I also get conspiracy-theory-style news from Topbuzz.

A couple weeks ago, I received this headline in a push notification, saying that former Beatle John Lennon's wife Yoko Ono was claiming to have had a lesbian affair with Hillary Clinton in the 1970s:

This headline is also objectively false. According to fact-checking website Snopes.com, the story originated in 2015 on a site which produces fabricated hoax stories for the purpose of generating click traffic. There is no evidence to support any claim that such an affair occurred, nor that Ono ever claimed that it did.

The fake news seems to be bipartisan as well, as I received a headline earlier this month reporting a scandal involving Republican Arizona senator John McCain:

For this one, it seemed as though the source of the article was not even a news organization or a hoax site, but just a user named "haitim738653." I searched online and could not find any reference to what scandal he was referring to. Nevertheless, TopBuzz put it at the top of my feed.

I even received another just the other day, claiming that actress Julia Roberts made a crude remark in comparing former first lady Michelle Obama and the current one, Melania Trump:

This claim is also false. Julia Roberts never made such a comment, and according to both fact-checking websites Politifact.com and Snopes.com, Roberts has also been a vocal supporter of the Obamas in the past, publicly fundraising for Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign.
Bytedance's global ambitions
Stories like this seem to appear on my TopBuzz feed every day. Even when the story is factually true, the sensational click-bait nature of the headlines tends to be misleading, and the content itself is usually from far-right or far-left-wing fringe websites.

TopBuzz is one of a series of apps in Bytedance's portfolio that it hopes to use to power its global expansion. In November, it announced an acquisition of video app Musical.ly for an estimated 800 million USD, which has a strong user base in North America and Europe. They also acquired global news aggregator New Republic that month. In Japan, Korea, and southeast Asia, they have experienced some success in their music-sharing app Tik Tok, which they launched in September. TopBuzz seems to be primarily focused on the North American and European markets.

While Bytedance is using different apps for different media and markets, they all operate with the same China-based back-end architecture. "We have different products that cover different regions, but the back-end recommendation engine is the same," explained Bytedance Senior VP Liu Zhen on the 996 Podcast. "All the engineers and product people are based in China."
Silicon Valley sea change
Bytedance aims to doing two different things that have proven challenging for Chinese tech firms: Succeed by delivering content to overseas, non-Chinese users, and to develop and manage apps that catch on with high and middle-income foreign markets.

As Bytedance has laid plans for global domination, one must wonder how their product and ambition will mesh with the shifts that have taken place in the West, and Silicon Valley in particular, over the past year.

America's tech giants, who have gained the trust of users in small part due to their ability to project themselves as friendly, democratic, "forces for good," have recently received greater public scrutiny. Most notable among them has been Facebook, who came under fire in late 2016 after it revealed that it received approximately $100,000 during the US election to publish Russia-linked ads aimed at "amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum."

While there does not seem to be an expert consensus on the extent to which Russian Facebook content influenced the election, one thing is clear: politics in the US, and many other democracies around the world, are more divided than they have been in decades. This is in no small part due to the algorithms that social media platforms use, which create information "echo chambers."

This effect was chronicled in a June 2015 study published in the journal Science entitled "Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook." Let's say person A and person B both live in the US. Person A tends to vote Democrat more often, while person B tends to vote Republican. Person A starts to click on stories from Democrat-leaning news outlets, while person B clicks on more Republican-leaning stories. Recognizing their clicking tendencies, Facebook's algorithm tries to curate content that is aligned with their habits, and begins to suggest more and more stories that confirm, rather than challenge, their existing worldviews.

Eventually, the recursive effect of the algorithm's interactions with the individuals create online universes where people not only receive different opinions in their news, but different facts altogether. The effect of this has been further polarization of the populace, as this Pew Research graph indicates:

In democratic societies where governance is based on the ability to have rational debate and reach compromise, this effect is downright dangerous.

Last December, when speaking to an audience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, former Facebook VP of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya used no uncertain terms when expressing "tremendous guilt" for the company he helped create, saying "I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works."

"The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works," he continued, referring to the system of "clicks, likes and thumbs-up" on which the platforms of Facebook and Bytedance are based. "No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it's not an American problem - this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem." He also described an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people.

Palihapitiya is just one of many tech pioneers who are beginning to re-examine just what impact their products have made on society. In November, Napster founder and early Facebook investor Sean Parker spoke publicly about becoming a "conscientious objector" to social media, saying that Facebook and other social media platforms were succeeding by "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology."
But what is Bytedance doing?
This has prompted some serious soul-searching at Facebook. In February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg published a nearly 6,000-word manifesto, in which he spoke in detail about his vision for the platform as a force for social good around the world, and the changes that need to be made in order to ensure that is the case. In January 2017, Facebook launched the Facebook Journalism Project, a comprehensive program designed to filter out fake and hoax stories, train and educate journalists and publishers, and improve news literacy among readers. In October, they announced new media guidelines designed to stop fake news, and introduced a " more information" button that would allow readers to check the credibility of the publisher before opening a link. Earlier this year, Facebook stock dropped 4 percent after Zuckerberg announced that the platform would be moving away from its content and ad-based model to emphasize more interaction between friends and family members.

As Silicon Valley and Facebook recon with the current backlash to the social problems they have helped create, it is difficult to see how Bytedance envisions the impact they would like to make. When asked about their policy for managing fake news or stance on the societal impact of social media, Bytedance PR declined to comment on the record.

To be fair, Bytedance does seem to acknowledge that social responsibility is something that they at least should reference publicly, but it is difficult to see exactly where it falls in the company's hierarchy of priorities.
"As AI becomes an increasingly integral part of our society, Bytedance believes that we - and our industry peers - have a duty to ensure that we understand and can anticipate the social impact of these new technologies, and manage this impact responsibly. We are delighted to provide this platform where some of the greatest minds and most influential people in our industry can come together to exchange ideas about the future of AI in our society, and drive the best ideas forward."
In December, they hosted an inaugural Global Festival for AI Ideas festival, at which founder and CEO Zhang Yiming made the following statement:

The challenge of managing fake news is something they at least seem to recognize, and they have publicized how they are using their technology to help find missing children in China. Their AI and methods for content monetization have also proven useful in helping small creators find audiences and convert their followings into income. They have also partnered with Tsinghua University School of Public Administration to establish the Innovation and Governance Center, which focuses on researching the social impact of, and response to, new technologies, and have formed something called the Bytedance Strategic Technology Committee to provide a sustained platform for cross-industry discussion of critical challenges at the intersection of AI and society.

At the same December event at which Zhang spoke, the head of Bytedance's AI lab Dr. Ma Wei-Ying addressed foreign journalists and spoke of how the company is developing techniques to train its AI to recognize and remove fake news. According to Ma, the platform also lets users report what they believe to be fake news and analyzes comments to detect whether they suggest the content might be fake. When the system identifies any fake content that has been posted on its platform, it will notify all who have read it that they had read something fake.

Despite Ma's claims, this is far from my experience with TopBuzz. Although I receive news that is verifiably fake on a near-daily basis, often in the form of push notifications, I have never once received a notification from the app informing me that Roy Moore is in fact not the new junior senator from Alabama, or that Hillary Clinton was actually not Yoko Ono's sidepiece when she was married to John Lennon.

Actually, on the very morning of the English version this piece's publication day, I learned from TopBuzz's "politics" and "science" channels that Barack Obama travels with a demon in his entourage and that NASA is hiding a secret alien base on the dark side of the moon:

I want to emphasize how widespread these kinds of stories are throughout the platform. They make up a very significant proportion of the content. On the night of February 1st, the top headlines on the "Science" channel claimed "the moon is really only 4 miles from the earth (that's closer than cruising altitude for a commercial airliner, by the way...), that Mercury will be knocked out of orbit and bring about the end of the world, and that the international space station is actually staged in a studio...

But what is perhaps more concerning is the very nature of the platform, its algorithm, and its incentive structure. Bytedance's core competency is its AI-based system for content creation, curation, and dissemination, which incentivizes content creators through financial rewards often based on clicks, and curates the content according to the preferences of each individual reader.

In other words, it seems as though Bytedance is basing its entire business model and global expansion on a turbo-charged version of the tools that Chamath Palihapitiya says are "ripping apart how society works." What Facebook is moving away from, Bytedance is diving into head-first.

In China, Bytedance censors their platform in response to pressure from authorities. In December 2017, the Beijing bureau of China's top regulator accused Toutiao of "spreading pornographic and vulgar information" and "causing a negative impact on public opinion online," and ordered the temporary suspension of some popular sections of the app. In response, Bytedance took down or suspended the accounts of more than 1,100 bloggers that is said had been publishing "low quality content" on the app. It also replaced its "Society" section with one called "New Era," which primarily pushes state media coverage of government decisions.

Outside of China, in Bytedance's target overseas markets like North America and Europe there is far less pressure from government censors, but the consequences of the media the public consumes is arguably of greater impact. After all, these people are voters. The information they receive has a direct impact on how their societies govern themselves, and social media has played a critical role in hampering the effectiveness of their democratic systems. The world does not need more "curated" information, it needs accurate information.

The globalization push of many Chinese firms is inspiring: What they offer can potentially meet genuine global needs. Mobike and Ofo are helping to ease traffic congestion, lessen pollution, and provide affordable transportation. Alibaba and JD are introducing pathways for foreign businesses to access Chinese consumers. Many of the state-owned firms are developing infrastructure which can spur economic development in underdeveloped regions of the world. But what exactly does Bytedance offer?
This article was originally published on Technode.com
Democracy and civil discourse are in rough shape these days. They are suffering from an unhealthy diet of inaccurate, misleading, and heavily biased information that have been fed to citizens through social media platforms. As Bytedance expands globally, its answer to this global "health crisis" seems to be a bigger, greasier cheeseburger.

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Toutiao's overseas platform is delivering fake news, but its problems run deeper than that

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This article was originally published on Technode.com Over the last year, few Chinese tech firms have made a bigger splash than news aggregator Jinri Toutiao.

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ByteDance’s main focus is content creation. The competition around this area of business is very competive and byte dances app TikTok has done very well and has forced other companies to come up with their own short form content add-ons.

Byte Dance has been under speculation in the U.S as it is a Chinese company. They have been under fire for gathering the information of its users. The U.S. had threatened to ban TikTok and has even brought the CEO of TikTok to court. These court cases and allegations have made many switch to other apps or deleted TikTok.

https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/where-will-tiktok-users-land-after-possible-us-ban

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more-than-any-other-social-media-app-study.html

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Fresh legal blows show how hard it will be for a TikTok ban to hold up in court | CNN Business

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A pair of back-to-back court victories for TikTok this week have threatened to make it harder for the company’s critics to clamp down on it, after a state judge in Indiana threw out one lawsuit against the popular short-form video app and a federal judge blocked a first-of-its-kind Montana law from taking effect that would have banned the app statewide.

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Lark is a company that is designed to help people in their journey to living a healthy lifestyle. Lark can help with things like chronic diseases, sleeping, exercise, and diet. They offer things like AI coaching and telemedicine. All their coaching is personalized to each client and everything is done with the upmost details to provide the best results.

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CapCut is a video/picture editing software. The app is free although there are versions with more features that cost money. This app includes things like videos trimming, special effects, music, filters, and more. Many people use this app to edit their videos and then later post them on Tik Tok, another one of Bytedance's companies. It is popular because of its simplicity and because it is free.

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Helo was a social media platform with multilingual content focused on community building. It was launched in India in June 2018. It was later banned in India.

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History of ByteDance

ByteDance was founded in 2012 by a team led by Yiming Zhang and Rubo Liang, who saw opportunities in the then-nascent mobile internet market, and aspired to build platforms that could enrich people's lives. The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. It followed that success with the launch of Douyin in September 2016. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok. It quickly took off in markets like Southeast Asia, signaling a new opportunity for the company. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 and subsequently merged it with TikTok. Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form mobile videos worldwide.

In support of its mission to Inspire Creativity and Enrich Life, ByteDance has made it easy and fun for people to connect with, create and consume content. People are also able to discover and transact with a suite of more than a dozen products and services such as TikTok, CapCut, TikTok Shop, Lark, Pico and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, as well as products and services specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, Fanqie, Xigua, Feishu and Douyin E-commerce.

ByteDance has over 150,000 employees based out of nearly 120 cities globally, including Austin, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, and Tokyo.

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ByteDance is a technology company operating a range of content platforms that inform, educate, entertain and inspire people across languages, cultures and geographies.