TikTok
Following an internal investigation by ByteDance , the company that owns TikTok , it was discovered that some employees were improperly using the company's analytical tools to access personal data of at least two American journalists and what is defined as a "small group of people" connected to them. It is reported that the employees have already been fired and there has been a position taken by the managing director of ByteDance, Rubo Liang, who expressed himself as "deeply disappointed" by the behavior of the workers which would have undermined the company's image, moreover already shaky especially overseas.The editorial staff of The Verge told the story and also published the documentation, which thus added rather hot material to the advances published yesterday by the New York Times. Employees would have illegally used ByteDance's internal tools to obtain information such as the IP addresses of journalists, so as to check their geographical location. According to American newspapers, the goal was to check whether the reporters had been in contact with other employees suspected of having passed confidential information to the press. On the other hand, the first two well-known journalists monitored were respectively from the Financial Times and BuzzFeed, or the editorial staff that in mid-2022 had published the scoop on the alleged spying of TikTok by the Chinese government. In the past few hours, Forbes has also reported tracking of its journalists.
And as confirmed by Forbes itself, following the investigation, ByteDancing allegedly fired Chris Lepitak who was responsible for the team of the other two employees involved, while Song Ye resigned, the manager who acted as through directly with the CEO Rubo Liang. In short, TikTok (better, ByteDance) immediately distanced itself from the incident, but the already fragile position of the social network in the USA has certainly been further damaged, where the Senate voted to ban government devices and has already registered the block in several universities such as that of Oklahoma.