According to The New York Times, an investigation revealed that employees were trying to locate sources that had leaked to reporters. Two of the employees were in the US and two were in China, where ByteDance is headquartered.
The company reportedly determined that members of a team responsible for monitoring employee behavior accessed IP addresses and other data linked to TikTok accounts of a reporter from BuzzFeed News and Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times. Employees are also said to have accessed data from large numbers of people linked to journalists. Forbes claims ByteDance is tracking three reporters who previously worked for BuzzFeed News. All three of these posts have published reports about TikTok, including its alleged ties to the Chinese government.
TikTok employees access data without permission!
In October, Forbes claimed that members of ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department were planning to use TikTok to track the locations of certain US citizens, while ByteDance denied these allegations. The company told the Times that it had restructured that department and blocked it from accessing any US data.
News of the investigation and employee layoffs came amid various attempts to ban TikTok in the US. Several states, including Georgia and Texas, have blocked the app on government-owned devices. Earlier this month, a two-part bill aimed to ban TikTok from US consumer devices, as well as other social apps linked to China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Senate has passed a $1.7 trillion spending bill that includes a measure that would ban TikTok on most devices issued by the federal government.