To gasoline the rise of its app Flipagram, TikTook guardian firm Bytedance scraped profiles, movies, usernames and different content material from Instagram and different social media platforms. Buzzfeed that the Chinese firm scraped “hundreds of thousands” of accounts for content material with out customers’ consent. Flipagram, which ByteDance acquired again in 2017, allowed customers to create quick slideshow movies set to music — form of a simplified model of TikTook and different short-form video apps. The app has since been rebranded as .

The scraping technique was meant to be a “growth hack” for Flipagram, permitting it to increase its person base, in line with former ByteDance staff interviewed by Buzzfeed. Flipagram was scraping as much as 10,000 movies per day from high-priority nations, in line with one former worker. The three platforms that Flipagram allegedly scraped content material from are Instagram, Snapchat and Musical.ly (which is owned by ByteDance and was later absorbed by TikTook). One former Bytedance worker disputes that Instagram was concerned within the scrape as a result of incompatible sizing of their movies on the time.

The staff additionally allege that the scraped content material from main US social media platforms was then used to construct Bytedance’s “For You” algorithm. TikTook has but to touch upon whether or not Flipagram’s stolen knowledge was used to construct TikTook’s “For You” algorithm.

Scraping publicly out there knowledge isn’t unlawful by itself. Many social platforms discover “creative” methods to spice up their viewers of their early days, like harvesting exterior content material, creating fake profiles or mass-emailing potential customers. But corporations can even ban unauthorized scraping of their phrases and situations for customers, which Instagram and Snapchat each do. Violating such contracts can usually result in lawsuits. 

There’s an irony to Bytedance in its early days allegedly scraping knowledge from Instagram, since Reels was Instagram’s try to seize TikTook’s viewers and as an alternative turned a receptacle for outdated TikToks. In order to maintain Reels from driving extra visitors to its rival app, Instagram not too long ago introduced it might not promote TikToks.