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Sep 17, 2024,03:58pm EDT

A former employee of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, claims Chinese national police detained his father and took him to “a remote secret facility” to interrogate and intimidate him after the former employee spoke to Western press about ByteDance’s censorship of content on TikTok.

The allegations appear in a redacted federal court filing in the case of another alleged TikTok whistleblower, Roger Yintao Yu. In a sworn declaration, the former employee says he worked at TikTok’s headquarters in Beijing in 2019 and 2020, and that “one of the main functions” of the platform he worked on “was to censor content on TikTok.” According to the declaration, he moved to the United States for graduate school and spoke about ByteDance’s censorship of TikTok in an interview with the Agence France-Presse in 2022, which was later translated and republished by the BBC.

Under penalty of perjury, the former employee wrote that his father relayed the officers’ orders: “The Chinese national police demanded, ‘keep your mouth shut.’ They also demanded that I contact the BBC and retract that BBC article, which I did under coercion and fear.” He said the BBC refused to retract its story.

“Chinese national police continued harassing my family on other occasions, demanding me to delete my social media posts on Twitter, which I eventually obeyed, after my family had been threatened."

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