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- TikTok has a matchmaking forum called "Meet Cute" for employees to set colleagues up on dates.
- Employees post pictures of friends and family as potential romantic partners in the forum.
- Some male staffers have taken this as an opportunity to openly comment on women's appearances.
TikTok has an internal matchmaking service for employees run via a forum through which colleagues can set each other up on dates, Forbes reported Thursday.
TikTok's parent company Bytedance developed a workplace productivity tool called Lark through which employees can communicate on a forum called Bytemoments. The forum includes channels like "Work Discussions," "Product Feedback," and "Meet Cute."
"Meet Cute," which has garnered over 420 moments and 11,500 interactions, is used to advertise friends, family, and acquaintances as potential romantic partners with pictures of them and information about their weight, height, and appearance.
"Do not post the personal information of internal ByteDancers, including your own," according to the channel's instructions, per Forbes.
Some employees have used the channel to judge the people being posted in them. In one comment thread, several men called the cousin of a colleague a "PO," which is a tech term referring to a high priority task, according to Forbes' reporting.
Forbes also noted that in one thread where men discussed a woman's weight, one comment reads: "My girlfriend is thinner than your girlfriend," followed by a smiley face emoji.
Bytedance openly announced its matchmaking service initially called "The Taro Plan," in a blog post on its Chinese news website Jinri Toutiao and encouraged employees to "treat finding a partner as an OKR."
OKR is an acronym for "objective and key result," which is a goal setting system for workers.
This practice is not uncommon in China, with The Guardian newspaper noting that a number of major Chinese corporates, such as Alibaba and Huawei, have internal matchmaking services.
In a statement sent to Insider, ByteDance said the "Meet Cute" function was only ever intended to be used in China.
"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 number of employees in other markets to add the channel to their ByteMoments on an opt-in basis. The bug has been resolved."
This is not the first that TikTok's internal culture has attracted attention. Former TikTok employees in the US previously opened up to Insider about a toxic work culture promoting overwork and secrecy about pay in 2022.
They described a "996" work culture which includes working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for six days a week and is a common practise in China where Bytedance is headquartered.
The 996 culture affected some employees' relationships with their partners and likely interfered with their dating lives.
Chloe Shih, a former lead product manager at the social media giant, told Insider "the work went so late, I couldn't hang out with friends, I couldn't have time with my partner."