TikTok facing US ban after China found spying on journalists

The talk around banning the China-made and operated social media app, TikTok, has been around since the Trump administration, or even in the days of it being called Musically. But now the idea has been given a new lease of life with the discovery that US journalists were spied on using the social media app by Chinese officials.

As reported by The Financial Times: “Over the summer, four employees on the ByteDance internal audit team looked into the sharing of internal information to journalists. Two members of staff in the US and two in China gained access to the IP addresses and other personal data of FT journalist Cristina Criddle, to work out if she was in the proximity of any ByteDance employees, the company said.”

Back in September, TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the company has ’a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols’ in place to limit internal data access, saying:

“Our goal is to ensure non US-based employees, including China-based employees, will only have access to a narrow set of TikTok US user data, such as public videos and comments available to anyone on the TikTok platform, to ensure global interoperability.”

It’s not looking likely that, unless the company undergoes some drastic change in operations, the TikTok app will last in the US.