The Biden administration recently increased pressure on TikTok over national security concerns stemming from its ties to China, and apparently the Justice Department and the FBI are also pressing their own.
Forbes first reported that agencies are actively investigating ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The investigation was reportedly launched after some employees took advantage of the application to spy on journalists in the US: an incident corroborated by internal investigation at the end of last year.
Now, The New York Times and other outlets have concurred with Forbes’ reports, confirming that the Fraud Section of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division is coordinating with the FBI and the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to investigate the violation of user privacy.
In the internal investigation, ByteDance discovered that some employees accessed data from the TikTok accounts of US journalists to investigate who in the company was leaking information to journalists. Of the employees involved in the incident, who were fired after the fact, two were part of the company’s operations in China.
The latest revelations come a week before TikTok’s CEO is set to testify before Congress, an appearance likely to raise deep suspicion, even by the technology’s audience standards. In the days leading up to the hearing, the Biden administration has hardened his stance toward the company considerably, threatening to ban the app in the US if TikTok’s Chinese owners don’t sell the company.
TikTok has rejected the new White House divestment demand, arguing that selling the company will not resolve the government’s concerns. Instead, TikTok pointed to its own proposed solution, although convincing the US government that a China-based company operating in the US should be able to self-regulate is a tough sell. To assuage concerns about the app’s relationship with China, TikTok launched a $1.5 billion initiative known as “Project Texas” that would store US user data nationwide and subject the company to a audit process carried out by the American technology giant Oracle.
