New Report Reveals TikTok 300 Employees Previously Worked for Chinese State Media
By Movieguide® Staff
According to a new report from Forbes, hundreds of employees at TikTok’s parent company ByteDance also worked for Chinese state media outlets.
The report found that around 300 workers surveyed on LinkedIn were previously employed by Chinese state media.
“Fifteen indicate that current ByteDance employees are also concurrently employed by Chinese state media entities, including Xinhua News Agency, China Radio International and China Central/China Global Television,” the report reads.
The U.S. State Department identified the list of organizations as “foreign government functionaries.”
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr recently pointed out the safety concerns to American’s data on TikTok and encouraged the CEOs of Google and Apple to remove the app from their stores.
Movieguide® previously reported:
U.S. Federal Communication Commission’s Brendan Carr called on Apple and Google to remove the China-owned social media app TikTok from their app stores.
The FCC commissioner said that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, is a risk regarding users’ data security.
Carr penned a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai highlighting recent reports of TikTok violating the company’s app store policy.
“TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or meme. That’s the sheep’s clothing,” Carr wrote in the letter. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
According to Carr, Apple and Alphabet need to provide explanations for “the basis for your company’s conclusion that the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing, coupled with TikTok’s pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not run afoul of any of your app store policies.”
In a statement to CNBC, a spokesperson said: “Like many global companies, TikTok has engineering teams around the world. We employ access controls like encryption and security monitoring to secure user data, and the access approval process is overseen by our US-based security team. TikTok has consistently maintained that our engineers in locations outside of the U.S., including China, can be granted access to U.S. user data on an as-needed basis under those strict controls.”
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