Time has quickly rolled into 2023, yet the shadow cast by 2022 still looms over TikTok.
TikTok's proposed solutions have failed to win over media outlets and official authorities
On December 22, 2022, foreign media including The New York Times, Forbes, and CNN successively disclosed that an internal ByteDance investigation found certain employees had improperly accessed the personal data of two U.S. journalists, including IP addresses and chat records. TikTok proactively acknowledged the error, stating that the relevant employees were no longer employed by ByteDance.
However, the news sparked widespread public uproar upon release. This once again put TikTok, which has always avoided high-profile moves yet remained under the constant public spotlight, at the center of public controversy.
According to existing public information, the incident of ByteDance employees accessing U.S. journalists' personal data was actually uncovered during an internal investigation, which was triggered by an earlier October 2022 Forbes report on "TikTok's parent company ByteDance accessing the geolocation data of U.S. citizens".
Source: Forbes
At that time, TikTok denied the content of the October Forbes report and carried out corresponding public relations response. Later, to verify the credibility of the report, TikTok's in-house legal counsel team and externally retained law firms launched an investigation.
TikTok denies content of Forbes report | Source: Twitter
The investigation found that during the process of TikTok's internal audit team investigating whether there were violations of employees leaking confidential information such as company documents, screenshots and audio recordings to the media,some members improperly accessed the personal data of 2 journalists and several TikTok users associated with them.
The two journalists are Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times and a journalist from BuzzFeed. According to a Forbes article published on December 23, 2022, three Forbes journalists, Emily Baker-White, Katharine Schwab and Richard Nieva, were also tracked, and all three had previously worked for BuzzFeed.
