- General
- June 2, 2018
- 3 minutes read
Tencent sues Bytedance for 1 Yuan and an Apology
Bytedance Technology, The Chinese internet startup currently valued at a huge $20 Billion has been sued by China’s biggest internet…
Bytedance Technology, The Chinese internet startup currently valued at a huge $20 Billion has been sued by China’s biggest internet giant Tencent which alleges that it promoted news which painted negative and reputation damaging views of Tencent.
Tencent particularly targets Bytedance’s News aggregation app Jinri Toutiao and also its Short video unit Tik Tok with this lawsuit, Tencent accuses Bytedance of tampering with a news headline on its platform Toutiao which reported that video game companies in China are not doing much to solve the problem of video game addiction, The article criticised various companies but Tencent alleges Bytedance altered the headline to make it look like only Tencent was targeted in the news article.
Tencent requests an apology for this and has currently suspended various partnerships across the two companies’ vast array of platforms.
This lawsuit comes after Bytedance’s short video unit Douyin previously sued Tencent alleging the company of being anti-competitive by blocking Bytedance’s content from Tencent platforms including the very popular WeChat amongst its other apps.
Bytedance says that this is an issue of Tencent abusing its position of being China’s leading internet services provider to eliminate competition from other players in the internet space.
The two multi-billionaire heads of both companies, Zhang Yiming and Ma Huateng of Bytedance and Tencent respectively, Previously went into an online argument on Tencent’s popular platform WeChat with Zhang alleging that Tencent plagiarised Douyin’s content, An accusation which was grossly denied and described as defamatory my Tencent co-founder Ma Huateng who is also known by the name Pony Ma worldwide.
Bytedance currently says it has no partnerships of sort with Tencent after the company said it will end all partnerships with it, We will now watch how this lawsuits will end up and if an apology and the payment of 1 yuan will be made to Tencent.
