TikTok has just released a damning report about its own employees obtaining the data of U.S. users. When a group of Americans want to ban the app, you should expect TikTok to become a major political talking point.
The results of an internal investigation were released by Byte Dance. Four of ByteDance's employees in China obtained the data of two TikTok accounts. It wasn't supposed to be done.
A bill to ban TikTok on U.S. government devices was passed in the Senate last week. Texas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Utah, West Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, and other states have statewide bans on TikTok on government devices.
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The report doesn't contain any information about what was done with the data. If that is what you are thinking, it probably wasn't printed out, clipped into a document, and handed to the leader. A group of ByteDance employees who were on the lookout for internal leakers were able to find the user data and addresses of U.S. reporters. Everyone involved in this effort was fired, according to reports.
The idea that TikTok is being used as a spy tool for the Chinese Communist Party has been made clear by Hawley and his ilk.
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There is no evidence that TikTok is part of China's plan to turn Americans into communists. Is getting the data a legitimate scandal? It's absolutely true.
When TikTok was an emerging internet phenomenon, news coverage about it consistently contained passages that raised concerns about its associations with the Chinese government. The most important claim is that user data is kept in the US and not in China. With Thursday's revelation, the company now admits that it wasn't true.
Reports have said that ByteDance cooperates with Chinese propaganda. One of the two journalists ByteDance now admits to having spied on is Emily Baker-White.
Marco Rubio, a luminary of the anti-TikTok crowd in the Senate, introduced a bill just before the latest report came out that would ban TikTok nationwide. He is over the top in his release. The answer to the People's Republic of China is known to us. There is no more time to negotiate with a company.
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Similar practices by U.S.-based platforms are alludes to by the senator in his twit. Social media platforms that are based in the U.S. help spread U.S. messages. FBI agents have used elaborate data-mining schemes to gather intelligence about users of social media. A study of user behavior on Facebook shows that knowledge of this snooping affects users' ability to speak freely, a phenomenon known as the "spiral of silence."
"Banning" TikTok isn't likely to cause it to disappear. ByteDance would most likely be able to recover its loss by selling it to an American ally like Microsoft.
TikTok has the power to do a lot more with user data. Even if TikTok were banned, users would still be spied on and influenced by intelligence agencies.
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