TikTok Has A Matchmaking Service For Employees To Set Up Their Colleagues

For the most part, users of ByteMoments appear to be employees based in China, where - and according to the Chinese-language news outlet Tech Planet, several other tech giants also provide dating forums or matchmaking services for their employees, including Alibaba, Meituan, and Huawei. Three TikTok employees told Forbes that the company's role in facilitating matchmaking felt like an encroachment on personal boundaries. "If you can't date outside the company, and you can't, because you're at the company all the time, then you look inward, and I guess that's why these services appear." He said even some factories in China offer matchmaking services to their employees. After publication of this story, ByteDance spokesperson Jodi Seth sent the following statement by email: "We consider cultural differences when building internal apps like ByteMoments. The Meet Cute function was specifically designed as an optional offering for mainland China employees only. Over the past few weeks, a technical bug briefly allowed a nominal amount of employees in other markets to add the channel to their ByteMoments on an opt-in basis. The bug has been resolved." "In response to a follow-up question about how ByteMoments was showing dating posts to U.S. employees in 2022, Seth commented:"We believe you are referring to an older version of ByteMoments, which was only visited by a handful of employees outside mainland China and has been deprecated. TikTok the workplace, employees say, has not always shown the same commitment to diversity and gender parity as TikTok the app. One employee on the company's "organizational culture" team wrote a post warning colleagues to protect themselves while meeting up with strangers - a warning that is reiterated in the Meet Cute introduction.