Tiktok reveals it accessed user data to track down U.S. journalists

The Financial Times has discovered that four employees on the TikTok’s internal audit team—accessed data for a Finanical Times and Buzzfeed journalist, plus a number of other users connected to those journalists.

The Investigation into internal leaks found that the employees were trying to locate the sources of leaks to reporters.

Two of the employees were in the US and two were in China, where TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance is based.

ByteDance says it has fired four employees who accessed the data for accessing the IP addresses and other data linked to the TikTok accounts of a reporter from BuzzFeed News and Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times.

Forbes claims that ByteDance tracked three of its reporters who previously worked for BuzzFeed News.

All three of those publications have published reports on TikTok, including on its alleged ties to the Chinese government. 

“The misconduct of those individuals, who are no longer employed at ByteDance, was an egregious misuse of their authority to obtain access to user data. This misbehavior is unacceptable, and not in line with our efforts across TikTok to earn the trust of our users,”

Bytedance said in a statement to Variety.

 “We take data security incredibly seriously, and we will continue to enhance our access protocols, which have already been significantly improved and hardened since this incident took place.”