Hey all - here's a quick timeline about how this TikTok spying stuff all went down:
In March, I broke the story that TikTok was working on Project Texas, a companywide effort to separate out US user data and limit China-based employees’ access to it.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-project-texas-bytedance-user-data
After that story, a person leaked me audio recordings of more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, most of them about Project Texas. The audio confirmed that China-based employees had regularly accessed US user data.
“I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.
After that story, TikTok and ByteDance freaked out a bit, and began Project Raven — an internal investigation to try to figure out who was leaking to me. The investigation was run by a ByteDance-based team led by a (now-resigned) exec in China.
But we kept going. In July, I reported that ByteDance had used another of its apps, a now-defunct news aggregator app called TopBuzz, to push pro-China messages to US users and censor criticism of the Chinese government.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-bytedance-topbuzz-pro-china-content
Former employees claim the company placed pieces of pro-China content in its now-defunct US news app, TopBuzz, and censored negative stories about the Chinese government. ByteDance says it did no such thing.
In August, we reported that >300 TikTok and ByteDance employees had worked for Chinese state media organizations, which really puts in perspective the fact that TikTok is the only major platform in the US that doesn’t label Chinese state media.
Three hundred current employees at TikTok and its parent company ByteDance previously worked for Chinese state media publications, according to public employee LinkedIn profiles reviewed by Forbes.
Emily Baker-White
jacques