Tencent files lawsuit against Toutiao for 1 yuan
Tencent filed lawsuits in Beijing on Friday against Beijing Bytedance Technology Co Ltd, the owner of Jinri Toutiao and weiboshijie Ltd, parent company of Douyin, claiming 1 yuan for compensation and demanding public apologies from the two companies to publish on these two new media platforms.
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Tencent accused the two companies of defamation by abusing their platforms influence.
Jinri Toutiao, or Toutiao, is China’s largest news aggregation platform and Douyin, a short music video social platform respectively, is the most downloaded video app in the world.
An article initially unauthorized and published online said nowadays online games have been severely impeding the growth of youngsters, and Tencent’s gaming division, together with other prominent game developers in China, are the ones to blame. Then Baidu News picked up the article, included Tencent in the headline and attributed to“Xinhua News Agency”. Toutiao then re-posted the article with the new headline. “Xinhua picks on Tencent” fast became the hot topic on Weibo, the social media and microblog platform.
In the statement, Tencent claimed on May 30, Toutiao pushed a biased article titled“Xinhua News Agency: How many more documents are needed to stop Tencent from the wrongdoing”through all its channels to reach a total of over than 100 milion Toutiao users, causing severe defamation to Tencent.
Part of the company’s announcement reads as below:
“Lately, Beijing Byte Bounce Technology Co., Ltd. , together with Beijing micro Broadcast Technology Co., Ltd. have defamed Tencent through various channels by pushing and spreading biased content, causing severe damage to Tencent‘s public image.
As per the above mentioned cause, Tencent decides to file lawsuits against the two companies and claim RMB 1 yuan, and also demand an apology published on their news and media platforms.
Since May, Bytedance, the parent company of Jinri toutiao and weiboshijie, parent company of Douyin have been continuously publishing and distributing defamatory comments, articles and videos to Tencent.
Tencnet hereby announced that they will cut off any ongoing collaboration with Beijing Bytdance Corp. and Beijing microvision company.”
Tencent and Bytedance, two of China’s biggest internet companies, seem to have trouble getting along. Last month, Tencent’s Pony Ma and ByteDance’s Zhang Yiming were found in argument over Zhang’s accusation that Tencent’s Weishi video platform plagiarizes Douyin, shortly after Tencent blocked Douyin on its Wechat platform.
