Legality of contents
On June 5, 2014, Guangzhou Daily sued Toutiao for violating its copyright.[29] The case was settled 13 days later.[30]
On September 16, 2014, the National Copyright Administration affirmed that Toutiao had violated the copyright of traditional media outlets by crawling and serving contents from its own servers; however, the administration also noted that Toutiao has already deleted the relevant contents and started negotiating for a formal license.[31]
On December 29, 2017, the Cyberspace Administration of China accused Toutiao and Phoenix News of "disseminating pornographic and vulgar information, had serious issues of misguiding people, and had an evil influence on the ecosystem of online public discourse",[32] listing "reposting news in violation of regulation, clickbait, and seriously disrupting the order of information flow on the network" as its main offense.[33] In response, Toutiao halted its content update for six of its channels for 24 hours, shut down its "Society" channel, banned thousands of accounts,[34] and started recruiting 2000 more censors.[35]
Privacy
Toutiao has a feature called "people you might know". In December 2017, users noticed that the feature consistently showed them their contacts, despite not giving permission to either Toutiao or WeChat to read them. When questioned, Toutiao states that it "does not possess, collect or process users' private data", and "reading users' contacts with their consent is a common practice in mobile Internet business".[36] On January 11, 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked Toutiao to "abide by the laws and regulations, and only collect necessary personal information legally in a justified manner".[37]
Fraudulent advertisements
On March 29, 2018, CCTV-2 reported that Toutiao showed advertisements violating the Advertising Law for dubious or counterfeit products, targeting cities where regulations aren't as tight. One company, Tong Ren Tang was forced to delist its genuine products by the CFDA on December 29, 2017, due to the complaints filed by those who bought the advertised counterfeits. Tong Ren Tang stated that they have never advertised on Toutiao, and have filed complaints against such illegal advertisements with Toutiao before, however in some cases Toutiao rejected their complaints, instead responding "Why don't you advertise? If you advertise your genuine products, there won't be any counterfeits," and when requested for the identities of the advertisers, Toutiao responded "you as a company have no rights to know that".
During an interview, employees of Toutiao says that as long as one's willing to pay more advertising fee, they don't care if the product is good or not, and if the product is not certified, they'll fake one, and they'll help set up a landing page with legal content which will guide the visitor to the illegal advertisement, and find a proxy company so that when the regulators find out, they can blame the proxy.[38]
Toutiao responded on March 30 saying that the relevant advertisers and proxies have been banned from Toutiao indefinitely, and the employees have been fired. Toutiao says it will soon implement a warning when users are navigating away from contents controlled by Toutiao.[39]
