On the eve of TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi’s upcoming hearing in Congress, TikTok, which is at the crossroads of fate, is in constant trouble. The US judiciary has begun to investigate the company’s surveillance of American journalists and users.
Last week, several media outlets reported that the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI were investigating allegations that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, were monitoring the data of U.S. journalists. Emily Baker-White, a technology reporter for Forbes Magazine who first broke the news, said at the end of last year that the locations of herself and two other colleagues were being tracked by ByteDance to find out their sources.
The Financial Times said last week that its journalist, Cristina Criddle, was also among the targets. TikTok admitted in December last year that it obtained reporter data, and said that it was an abuse of power by internal employees of the company, accessing the data of American TikTok users in order to find out that the company’s secrets were leaked.
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, said that all four employees involved have been fired. Two of the four employees are in the United States and two are in China. TikTok previously assured U.S. lawmakers that U.S. user data would not be handed over to its Beijing-based parent company.
Former DIA Senior Intelligence Analyst Dan Garrett (Photo credit: Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation website)
Former DIA Senior Intelligence Analyst Dan Garrett (Photo credit: Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation website)
“Journalists need to realize that they are in an extremely technologically hostile environment,” Dan Garrett, a former senior intelligence analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense, told VOA. “Investigative reporting is often publicly identified as being written by individual journalists, making these journalists easy targets. Malicious actors can use social media, mobile phones, and other technological means to conduct a data search on journalists to find them. informant,” he added.
Wang Yaqiu, a senior researcher at the China Department of the non-governmental organization “Human Rights Watch”, believes that TikTok’s monitoring of journalists is a threat to journalists exercising their freedom of the press.
“On the other hand, this also reflects the freedom of the press in the United States. This matter has been exposed, and TikTok itself has admitted it. Now the US government is also investigating. The whole system is still in operation,” she told VOA.
The New York Times reported last week that the Justice Department probe also includes TikTok’s use of spying on other U.S. citizens or improperly obtaining user data. Tensions between the U.S. and China continue to mount on a number of issues, including Western concerns about the security of TikTok user data.
TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi will be questioned by the Energy and Commerce Committee of the US House of Representatives on Thursday (March 23). On Monday, Zhou Shouzi released a rare video announcing that TikTok’s monthly active users in the United States had grown from 100 million in 2020 to 150 million this year.