‘DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED’

TikTok Admits to Obtaining Journos’ Data to Hunt Down Leak Source

In a series of emails to staff, company executives fessed up to the global misconduct.

ByteDance, the parent company of the video platform app TikTok, has admitted it inappropriately accessed two journalists’ data as part of an investigation into an internal leak at the company. One of those investigated users, Cristina Criddle, was a Financial Times reporter who led a series of revealing reports on alleged labor violations at the China-owned company’s London office over the summer, including a “kill list” of employees that the company sought to push out. A Buzzfeed reporter’s data was also obtained as part of a probe into leaks. ByteDance’s Internal Audit department worked but ultimately failed to identify which company employees were in Criddle’s proximity. In an email to staff, TikTok’s general counsel Erich Andersen wrote that four members of the department, who have since been fired, violated the company’s code of conduct and “misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data.” In another email obtained by The New York Times, ByteDance’s CEO Rubo Liang said he was “deeply disappointed” by the revelation, and that public trust would be “significantly undermined” by the misconduct.