TikTok accused of racial discrimination, bias and retaliation of Black workers

TikTok is facing allegations of discrimination and retaliation by two of its former employees.

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About a year into her sales job at TikTok, Nnete Matima had what she describes as her first-ever panic attack. It happened right after she got off the New York subway and saw TikTok’s office building, where she worked. She says she started having heart palpitations.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘if you keep coming to this place, it’s going to kill you,’” she says.

Matima said she was under sever stress at TikTok — she was given heavier workloads, excluded from meetings and found out her supervisors called her names behind her back. Matima says she filed a complaint with human resources, but the company disregarded her claims and her managers retaliated. When she filed a second complaint, she was fired.

Matima has now taken her case to the U.S. government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC. She and another Black employee, Joel Carter, who had a similar experience at another TikTok office, filed a class action charge against the company on Thursday.

Matima and Carter allege TikTok has a practice of downplaying complaints of racial discrimination and then retaliates against people who speak out. They say this has a chilling effect on other employees from coming forward.

TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The tech sector has long had an issue with race discrimination. Many top tech companies have faced criticism for mistreatment of Black employees, including Google, Facebook, Pinterest and more.

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