Tech giants Tencent and Bytedance on Monday both made a report to the police concerning the recent defamatory remarks that the companies claim are far-reaching and organized, the Shenzhen Evening News reported yesterday.
At 10 a.m. Monday, Shenzhen-headquartered Tencent released a statement on its Twitter-like Weibo account saying that it had officially reported the case to the police based on evidence.
According to Tencent, the company has recently encountered continuous, vast and irregular malicious attacks, which lack basic argumentative logic and use different kinds of untrue information and rumors to smear the company and the related Internet industry.
An hour and a half later, Bytedance, the parent company of popular news app Jinri Toutiao, also released a statement saying that the company reported similar issues involving a bout of massive and organized mud-slinging to the police.
On Monday afternoon, Tencent updated the progress of the incident on Weibo. According to the post, several people related to the case had been arrested while others fled overseas.
Though Bytedance didn’t disclose any follow-up information, it released several screenshots revealing the records of chats and money transfers. The screenshots showed that a public relations company had communicated with a self-media platform to publish certain articles about Jinri Toutiao and made financial transactions through bank transfers.
It has been reported that the defamation dispute is the latest development in a tussle between Tencent and Bytedance, who have already had several confrontations over the openness of Tencent’s social apps towards Bytedance’s Jinri Toutiao and short video platform Douyin.
According to Chen Yongwei, researcher with the Peking University Center for Market and Networking Economy, the focus of the two companies’ row lies in the competition over users’ attention.
“Legally speaking, it cannot be said that the two companies are in competition. But as users’ attention is limited, the rapid rise of Douyin inevitably reduces the time that users spend on other apps, including WeChat,” said Chen.