Of the roughly 1,000 non-US employees that TikTok and ByteDance sought to hire for its US teams via H-1B visa applications between October 2022 and September 2023, most were from China.
Six hundred and sixty-nine of the 1,089 approved H-1B hires for TikTok and ByteDance last financial year were from China, a 50 per cent increase from the previous year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data obtained by Business Insider via a Freedom of Information Act request. The federal government’s financial year runs from October through September.
Fourteen of those 669 approved hires were recruited to work under TikTok’s US Data Security Division, or USDS, a section of the company dedicated to keeping US user data out of the hands of the Chinese government and other actors that the US government has deemed a foreign adversary. Those roles included work in data science, fraud strategy, systems analysis, and software engineering.
