TikTok and ByteDance hire hundreds of Chinese workers in US despite scrutiny

More than 60 per cent of the over 1,000 approved H-1B hires for TikTok and ByteDance last financial year were from China

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The office of TikTok in Culver City, California. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:03am, 13 Nov 2024

TikTok did not shy away from hiring employees from China last year, even as US officials accused the app of being a national security risk because its owner ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing.

Of the roughly 1,000 non-US employees that TikTok and ByteDance sought to hire for its US teams via H-1B visa applications between October 2022 and September 2023, most were from China.

Companies use the H-1B programme to hire foreign workers who have business skills that they say they cannot otherwise obtain from the existing US workforce.

Six hundred and sixty-nine of the 1,089 approved H-1B hires for TikTok and ByteDance last financial year were from China, a 50 per cent increase from the previous year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data obtained by Business Insider via a Freedom of Information Act request. The federal government’s financial year runs from October through September.

The ByteDance office in Beijing. Photo: EPA-EFE

Fourteen of those 669 approved hires were recruited to work under TikTok’s US Data Security Division, or USDS, a section of the company dedicated to keeping US user data out of the hands of the Chinese government and other actors that the US government has deemed a foreign adversary. Those roles included work in data science, fraud strategy, systems analysis, and software engineering.