TikTok Parent Spied on U.S. Journalists’ Locations — Then Lied about It

TikTok’s CCP-linked parent company, ByteDance, admitted this week that it spied on several U.S. journalists who had reported on TikTok’s presence in China, using data from the app to approximate their locations, Forbes reported. Although ByteDance played it off as an isolated incident undertaken by rogue staffers without permission, the Forbes report indicates otherwise.

The news reveals that TikTok persistently spread false information, in public and in at least one briefing with congressional staffers this year, about its spying campaign. No one at TikTok has yet stepped down or been fired in the wake of the admission.

TikTok’s spy campaign involved monitoring the locations of Forbes’s Emily Baker-White, Katherine Schwab, and Richard Nieva, in addition to the Financial Times’s Cristina Criddle, in order to find the identities of TikTok employees who had leaked to them.

ByteDance’s leadership sent emails to the firm’s staff on Thursday claiming that four employees — two in the U.S. and two in China — had tried to identify TikTok employees whose leaks to the media this year revealed that staff in China could access U.S. users’ data. Previously, TikTok had claimed that such access to U.S. data from China was impossible.

Although the emails by ByteDance executives, including CEO Rubo Liang, claimed that only four former employees were responsible for the surveillance of U.S. journalists, Forbes’s reporting indicates that in fact ByteDance leadership offices, too, were aware of the spy campaign.

ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks claimed in a statement to Forbes that the investigation found that ByteDance only surveilled Baker-White, when in fact internal documents obtained by the outlet prove that it had also spied on Schwab and Nieva.

The spokesperson also claimed that ByteDance’s head of global legal compliance, Catherine Razzano, only learned about the spy campaign in late October — but Forbes reports that Razzano was aware of it before that time. In addition, ByteDance’s spying involved the firm’s chief security and privacy office, in addition to Razzano.

ByteDance initiated the spy campaign after Baker-White reported for BuzzFeed in June that China-based employees can access U.S. users’ data, according to Forbes.

While Forbes reported in October that ByteDance planned to monitor the location of U.S. users, TikTok vociferously — and falsely — denied the allegations in public and behind closed doors during at least one briefing with congressional staff.

After the October report, TikTok published a thread on Twitter claiming the Forbes’s reporting on TikTok “continues to lack both rigor and journalistic integrity.” The TikTok tweets went on to claim, falsely, that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activities, public figures or journalists.”

TikTok staff additionally made false statements about China-based employees’ ability to spy on U.S. users of the app in a September meeting with congressional staff, according to two senior House GOP lawmakers, James Comer and Cathy McMorris Rodgers. In the next Congress, they are expected to launch probes into TikTok as the presumptive next chairpersons of the Oversight Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee, respectively.

After Forbes’s report in October, they wrote a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew alleging that it appears that “the company shared potentially false or misleading information with bipartisan Committee staff,” since TikTok had claimed in the meeting that employees in China could not access to U.S. users’ location data.

This week’s revelations are likely to spur further congressional action — beyond the expected passage of a bill to ban the app from government devices — and potentially shape the Biden administration’s negotiations with TikTok leadership regarding the company’s future in the U.S. Earlier this month, representatives Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, and senator Marco Rubio, introduced a bill that would ban TikTok and ByteDance from operating in the U.S. altogether.

Some Democratic lawmakers who supported banning TikTok from government devices had previously worried that the new bipartisan proposal for a total ban would undermine the Biden administration’s ongoing negotiations with TikTok. Those talks could work out a data-security arrangement that would potentially permit the app to remain in the U.S.

Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, previously said that he would likely wait for the administration to act before supporting the Rubio proposal. In light of yesterday’s revelations, however, that seems to have changed.

He indicated in a statement to Forbes that his patience is wearing thin:

This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform has permitted TikTok engineers and executives in the People’s Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of U.S. users despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected. The DoJ has also been promising for over a year that they are looking into ways to protect U.S. user data from Bytedance and the CCP — it’s time to come forward with that solution or Congress could soon be forced to step in.