Ex-TikTok employees claim they were ordered to routinely send American user ... trends now
TikTok ordered employees to send US user data to its Beijing-based parent company, according to a new investigation.
These data included spreadsheets full of names, emails, demographic data, and location data, former employees have claimed.
According to the investigation, TikTok concealed this close contact with ByteDance starting in 2022, claiming that it had cut most ties with its parent company.
Though the claims span 2022 to 2023, the revelation comes after Congress passed a bill that forces TikTok to decouple its US presence from ByteDance due to fears that it could be used as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party to surveil Americans and wield political or social influence.
TikTok aggressively refuted the findings of the investigation, calling them 'fabrications' from 'disgruntled former employees.'
TikTok reportedly maintained close ties to parent company ByteDance in China, even after claiming to have cut ties.
In response to questions about what the ex-employees claimed, a TikTok representative directed DailyMail.com to an X thread that strenuously denied the claims raised in the new investigation.
That thread calls the article 'factually inaccurate,' but it does not deny that TikTok sent US user data to ByteDance before 2023.
'The piece deliberately distorts timelines, omits basic facts, and relies on disgruntled former employees as its primary sourcing,' reads the X post in part.In interviews, 11 employees claimed that TikTok's distance from ByteDance was just for appearances, and that there remained a secret chain of command where US employees continued reporting to Chinese executives.
'I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China,' data scientist Evan Turner told Fortune. 'They were completely complicit in that. There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this.'
Turner reportedly worked as a senior data scientist for TikTok from April to September of 2022.
Upon his hiring, he reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing. Soon after, he was reassigned to a US-based executive.
The shift came after TikTok kicked off an initiative to keep US user data in the US.
But Turner claimed he never met with the American boss, and that a human resources employee told him he would continue reporting to the ByteDance exec.
He had short, weekly calls with the Chinese boss, in which he gave updates on his work progress.
During the approximately six months he worked for TikTok, Turner claims his work included sharing swaths of US user data with ByteDance.
Every two weeks, he sent spreadsheets containing data on TikTok users, which the company would use to figure out where people were watching which types of videos, and how the company should spend its promotional resources to get users to watch more videos.
It is not clear whether the Chinese government had access to these data, though
