“Growth Hack”: TikTok Owner ByteDance Stole Instagram & Snapchat Content To Train Algorithm (Reports)
By RT News
ByteDance lifted unauthorized content from Instagram and Snapchat to open fake accounts to help develop TikTok predecessor Flipagram’s algorithms. (BuzzFeed News)
The report claims the Beijing-based engineering team scraped more than 10,000 videos a day to cultivate its system to cater for US users’ preferences.
The “growth hack” tactics did not go unnoticed by Some Instagram users who complained that their content appeared on Flipagram without their knowledge or content.