As Republican states attempt to prohibit the Chinese-owned app from federal workers’ phones, TikTok made the shocking admission that it has used its app to snoop and track down American journalists. TikTok’s parent company ByteDance admitted that its employees had secretly recorded the conversations of multiple users and American journalists.
According to The New York Times, the staff checked the journalists’ IP addresses to see if they were in the same geographic region as Chinese-owned corporate employees who were suspected of leaking sensitive information.
TikTok has never targeted any “members of the U.S. government, activists, public personalities, or journalists,” according to an initial statement from ByteDance that refuted charges of espionage and said it could not monitor U.S. users.
Forbes has obtained documents from an outside legal firm that reveal the Chinese company intended to utilize TikTok to track the precise whereabouts of some American people.
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Earlier this week, Forbes claimed that some of its journalists were part of a “covert monitoring program.”
Forbes’s top editor, Randall Lane, termed it “a clear assault on the idea of a free press and its crucial role in a functioning democracy.”
Chris Lepitak, the chief internal auditor of the app and leader of the team responsible for the snooping, has been sacked, while his manager in China, Song Ye, has resigned.
This has increased the pressure on the U.S. government to restrict access to the app within the country. The likelihood of a legislative ban on TikTok for government workers using official devices appears high. However, this prohibition has already been adopted by more than a dozen states.
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South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, banned the use of TikTok on state-issued devices earlier this month.
During a press conference, Noem stated, “South Dakota will have no part in the intelligence collection operations of nations who despise us…”
TikTok is being used by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on and control the American public by collecting data from users’ gadgets.
