US(Washington Insider Magazine) -ByteDance employees tracked down several journalists as part of a covert surveillance campaign.
ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, has admitted that former employees of the company tracked down American journalists who were investigating matters related to that firm.
According to material reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance employees tracked down several Forbes journalists as part of a covert surveillance campaign designed to uncover the source of leaks within the company.
Employees, who have already been laid off by the company, improperly accessed the journalists’ IP addresses and user data in an attempt to identify whether they had been in the same places as ByteDance employees, thereby potentially uncovering those responsible for information leaks in the company.
The investigation launched by former ByteDance employees, which included spying on reporters, arose after leaks within the company led to a barrage of articles exposing the company’s ongoing ties to China.
Once the incident was discovered, ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led the team responsible for surveillance tactics. While China-based executive Song Ye, to whom Lepitak reported, resigned.
Forbes recalled that it first reported the surveillance tactics, overseen by a China-based ByteDance team, in October.
Following the article’s publication, ByteDance and TikTok responded on Twitter that “TikTok has never been used to monitor any member of the US government, activist, public figure or journalist.”
Now the CEO of ByteDance, Rubo Liang, admitted in an email sent to that medium that the TikTok social network had been used in exactly this way, as Forbes had reported.
The Ravenn Project
The surveillance tactics beaten by former TikTok workers became known internally as Project Ravenn and began in the summer of 2022, after BuzzFeed News published a story revealing that employees of China-based ByteDance had repeatedly accessed user data. americans.
Project Raven, according to internal ByteDance documents reviewed by Forbes, involved the company’s Security and Privacy Headquarters, was known to TikTok’s Head of Global Legal Compliance, and was approved by ByteDance employees in China.
This project followed the lead of Emily Baker-White, Katharine Schwab and Richard Nieva, three Forbes journalists who previously worked at BuzzFeed News.
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This article is written by La Opinión.
