
A former Chinese internet censor said he was interviewed for the role of monitoring and policing videos posted by international users of TikTok, a Chinese-owned short video app used by millions of Americans.
Liu Lipeng, who worked as an online censor in China for a decade, said he was passed over for the job in 2018 after suggesting in the interview that TikTok shouldn’t overly censor content because Americans value freedom of speech.
He described TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Technology Co., the Beijing-based digital giant with a reported valuation of $100 billion as of May, as “the largest and most terrifying censorship machine” he has ever seen.